New Board Member Profile

Kim Hartmann — Hartmann Consulting

by Meta Levin

Kim Hartmann is beam-

ing with pride these days. Her goal of attracting more young people to the green industry is bearing fruit in her own family.

Hartmann, one of the newest ILCA Board Members, is watching as her niece, a biology major, is finding her way to plant science as she works in her agriculture and horticulture internships. Her son, an environmental science and geology major, is studying some of the same climate change and soil concepts she discussed with him as he was growing up.

Known around ILCA for her work on the Education Committee, Hartmann grew up on a farm, the daughter of a farmer and a teacher. She earned degrees in agriculture and communications from the University of Illinois, working for 18 years in management consulting.

It was then that she decided to follow her passion, which, as it happens, was gardening and garden design. Off she went to classes at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Northwestern University and the College of Lake County. That led to a job with Craig Bergmann in Winthrop Harbor and finally to Countryside Flower Shop Nursery and Garden Center in Crystal Lake, where she was a landscape designer, led tours, lectured to garden clubs, schools, youth groups and others, as well as teaching Master Gardener courses. She heads the Master Gardener program Speaker’s Bureau.

While at Countryside, the Illinois Green Industry Association (IGIA) was in merger talks with ILCA and leadership there suggested that she join the ILCA education committee, as a liaison from IGIA. She did and quickly became involved. “My ILCA work got much deeper quickly,” she says. This led to eventually becoming the chair. Under

Kim Hartmann

her leadership, the committee’s activities, primarily at iLandscape, grew. She is still involved in IGIA, as well. “They overlap, but with different priorities and needs.”

Now she is taking one more leap: she has left Countryside to start her own business, Hartmann Consulting, which focuses on horticulture communication, education and design. As part of her new business, she will continue speaking to green industry, consumer and school audiences, as well as using her expertise in marketing, consumer and employee research for the green industry.

She hopes to bring these capabilities to the ILCA board. “In my former career, I did consumer and employee research, quantitative and qualitative,” she says. She foresees using one-on-one conversations and focus groups to gather data, then interpreting it and creating action plans to benefit ILCA and its members.

In addition, she looks forward to using the knowledge she has gained by organizing and planning not only the iLandscape educational offerings, but conferences, garden tours and training sessions for ILCA, IGIA and the Perennial Plant Association.

Hartmann loves to travel, always stopping at botanic gardens in whatever location she is visiting. She considers owning her own business a gift that will allow her more flexibility to do that, as well as visit her son, Zak, who lives in Colorado and spend time with her daughter, Aly, and granddaughter, Dahlia, who live a quick six minutes away from her. As her youngest, Teddy, finishes his degree at Illinois State University, she can travel with him to various geologic field study locations.

Married and the mother of three, grandmother of one – with another on the way – Hartmann has a cutting garden and loves to provide flower arrangements for friends and family. In fact, she has created personalized floral arrangements for weddings and special occasions for friends and family. She even traveled to England to do wedding flowers for a family friend.

She also is a fan of live music “of all genres, especially R&B and Classic Rock,” she says.

Hartmann hasn’t left the ILCA Education Committee. In addition to being the ILCA Board liaison to the committee, she is helping reimagine the education offerings in the pandemic era and beyond. In 2021, the committee made a quick pivot to an all-virtual conference. Now ILCA must decide how future conferences will look. Hybrid with some sessions recorded and offered for later viewing? With a goal of reaching more people, how do you price that? How to make it more accessible longer? “We can do things as education for education’s sake, but we want attendees to think about what they can do with the knowledge,” she says.

And that is but one of the reasons Hartmann wants to stay active. It is, she says, energizing. There is much to do.