Member Highlight on Abigail Gardens

I’m hardly a business tycoon or horticultural authority, but at 25 years old, I now own a serviceoriented gardening business that I eponymously transitioned into Abigail Gardens. With nine months of business ownership under my belt, the driving forces for success in my business are focusing on employees and relying on self-assuredness.

Two vehicles, six employees, and about fifty-five regular clients. We’re small but mighty, and I certainly can’t be considered responsible for its conception. As a previous employee of Leslie Harris at LH Gardens, I was shocked (to say the least!) when she dropped the bomb on me and asked me to buy and take-over the business from her.

I never had intentions of becoming a professional gardener. After receiving my degree from St. Lawrence University in Modern Foreign Languages in 2018, I made the move from rural upstate New York to Charlottesville. Although I had plans of becoming a teacher, it was ultimately the ability to work with my hands, be outside, and the allure of becoming nature’s eternal student which had me captivated by the world of horticulture.

It was May of 2021, and we launched into a whirlwind transition- three and a half months later, Abigail Gardens was born, and my head still spins when I think about how quickly it all happened. There’s a steep learning curve that comes with transitioning from employee to employer, and time is hardly ever on your side. Technically, the heavy lifting was already done, as I had many of the big picture things in place thanks to Leslie. There were, however, a lot of growing pains. Leslie had created something that worked really well, so I wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel with Abigail Gardens, but I did spend a lot of time considering what spirit and ethos I wanted my business to embody.

If the success of Abigail Gardens is measured only by our ability to turn a profit, then it isn’t a success in my eyes. While we do need to turn a profit, adding quality of life to all of those involved with the business – clients, plants, employees-- is an integral part of our mission.

With all that’s involved in running a business such as this, I knew I needed someone at my side that matched my passion and work ethic. Sarah Schrock, another previous employee of LH Gardens, I felt was going to be the perfect fit. Despite all the unknowns of a transitioning business, Sarah gladly accepted the position of Manager of Operations.

“It doesn’t feel like I have to go to work each day, I get to go to work each day,” says Schrock. “We spend so much time throughout our lives at work, that it really ought to be spent doing something you enjoy.”

We never claim to be the most inexpensive service, and much of the reason why is so that employees can earn a decent and livable wage. Jobs are plenty, especially in today’s market, so I place the focus on employee retention and happiness. In my years working at nurseries, I never understood why some of my employers suffered through the revolving door of employee turnover, specifically in the landscape departments. My thought process was, retain the best employees by truly investing in and empowering them to maintain excellent work. Maybe it was more complicated than that, but in my business, I see it as a very simple input/output equation: treat employees right and they’ll reward you with higher quality work. If you want to offer a top-tier, gold standard product, you have to first make your workers feel as though they are top-tier. That’s the beautiful irony of this whole operation- it’s about me in the sense that it’s me, Abigail, calling all the shots in the garden, but it’s not really about me in the slightest.

The hiring process at Abigail Gardens is somewhat rigorous. Between one and three paid, working interview days are required. We’re such a small team that it’s highly important that potential hires are the right fit energetically. If you are vying for employment at Abigail Gardens, common interview questions that you may not have heard before include, “How do you feel about taking direction from someone younger than you?” Or, “How do you feel about working on an all-female team, as it so happens to be right now?” (Hint: the only correct answers are some variation of, ‘It doesn’t bother me’).

The job is not inherently glamorous, but we make it so. Currently, our “office” is a tiny corner of my one-bedroom apartment. Our headquarters is the parking lot of a defunct convenience store. We have only our vehicles, a storage pod, one running spigot, and a very shabby looking fence we built ourselves from pallets. We don’t even have electricity! We make do with very little creature comforts and put all our resources and concentration into our clients and their gardens that we tend.

Our over-arching goal in every task, project and design is to marry proper horticultural practices with aesthetic function in the landscape. In other words, we equally value what is healthiest for the plant and how it will look. Fine gardening is fairly niche as it stands, but we offer an extra level of “niche-ness” that is surprisingly sought-after. The care and attention to detail that we give to fifty, sixty, or a hundred-year-old shrubs is something I’ve found clients really appreciate, and new customers seek us out for this very reason. Pruning in particular is our art form; we’re shaping

functional, living sculptures, and we approach even the tiniest of boxwood with that mindset. I take this art form so seriously, I give a hard ‘no’ to electric shearing or any practice that will consistently cause a plant to grow incorrectly. My crew can attest to the way my eyes light up as I enthusiastically explain to a client how having us hand prune their shrubs will be one of the best investments they could make in their landscape.

Other things we offer that sets us apart from landscapers and other fine gardeners include a commitment to being fully organic and using battery power only. I’m not being dramatic when I say that we hate loud noises and chemicals. Those things just kind of defeat the tranquility of being a gardener, no?

When it comes to competition, I put my blinders on. I pay attention to what other services are providing to some degree, but at the end of the day, I get the most satisfaction from knowing that I can only focus on what I’m doing.

For design, I do look outward for inspiration, but often I have a gut feeling that something looks and feels ‘right’ before I’m able to put words to why. My mind is a free space where I try not to have too many pre-determined ideas. Anything might speak to me at any given time- I just roll with it, be it a floral pattern on a dress, the intricate texture of a tree trunk, or the color palette of a peculiar fungus. Nature is the creator; I’m just the curator.

There’s something deeply satisfying about having a career that requires you to be mentally sharp, physically robust, and creatively uninhibited. By day, I garden with some of the finest people and professionals that I know. By night and weekend, I run the business side of things. While I enjoy both roles, my favorite place to be is out on a job with my crew.

With our one-year anniversary coming this fall, I’m excited with all the progress we have accomplished thus far. Each day I find that I am learning more and more about how to make this business reflect what is truly important to me, what I want to bring to me clients, and the type of work experience I want to offer employees. •