A Lifetime in Landscaping

My mother was raised by a farming family from Quito, Tennessee, and I believe I inherited much of her love of the earth. My father was a creative person in many different ways, so I like to think I got a combination of the two—my father’s creativity and my mother’s love for growing things.

One of my earliest memories of gardening came from my mother.

When I was very young, she showed me how you could pull the flower from a marigold and find the seeds inside. We saved those seeds through the winter, and the next spring we cultivated a bed and planted them.

I was amazed.

Those tiny seeds we had saved became flowers.

Looking back, I would say that was probably the seed that started all of this.

By the age of twelve, I had talked my parents into letting me mow their yard. Not long after that, the maintenance man at our church, Bartlett Baptist Church, left, and they needed someone to mow the church grounds. I took over the job for five dollars a week and continued doing it for years.

By sixteen, once I was able to drive, things had grown considerably. Somehow, at that age, I managed to get contracts with two apartment complexes, a factory, and somewhere around 25 to 30 residential yards.

My employees consisted of my twelve-year-old little brother and his twelve-year-old friend.

It was a different time.

Looking back now, I can hardly believe people trusted someone that young to take care of their properties—but they did.

A couple of years later, I met a landscaper who took an interest in me. He became a mentor and encouraged me to learn landscape design. I began designing for him, and suddenly I discovered an entirely different side of the business.

After I had been working there for a few months, my family took our Christmas vacation to Disney World. I remember walking around amazed by the landscaping—the beauty, the creativity, and the way every element worked together.

Somewhere during that trip, I decided:

This was what I wanted to do with my life.

When I returned to Memphis, a few connections gave me the opportunity to landscape the new Bartlett Cleaners. They were pleased with the job and began handing out my business cards.

Customers started coming from that first landscape project.

Then one referral led to another.

And another.

That is really how the business was built.

We didn’t have sophisticated marketing campaigns or elaborate advertising. People saw our work, told someone else about it, and passed along our name.

All these years later, that really hasn’t changed very much.

Our business is still built largely on referrals.

A Lifetime of Learning

Over the years, I have been fortunate to landscape homes for what I would call a “who’s who” of customers. More importantly, I have been blessed to meet a lot of outstanding people along the way.

Many of those relationships have meant just as much to me as the work itself.

People sometimes ask where I learned to do what I do.

I don’t know that there is one simple answer.

I believe God blessed me with the ability to create, but He also blessed me with the ability to see beauty in a way that perhaps not everyone does.

I can see beauty almost everywhere I turn.

Sometimes it is already there.

Sometimes I can see what something could become before anyone else can see it.

But whatever natural ability I may have been given is only part of the story.

The rest has come from a lifetime of experience.

I have encountered drainage problems, plant problems, construction problems, design problems, and probably just about every other problem that can happen on a landscape project.

Some things worked exactly as I thought they would.

Some certainly did not.

But through every one of those experiences, I learned.

Over a lifetime in this business, you learn not only how to do things right, but sometimes, just as importantly, how not to do them.

Much of what I know today came from solving problems, correcting mistakes, and remembering those lessons the next time I encountered something similar.

After all these years, I am still learning.

But I also have the benefit of decades of seeing what works, what doesn’t, and what will still look good and function properly many years after the job is finished.

What Success Means to Me

Like anyone who has been self-employed for a long time, I have experienced difficult seasons.

I have worked through the mortgage crisis, recessions, and times when it seemed like the economy had simply stopped. There have been plenty of moments when I wondered where the next job would come from.

Yet somehow, through all of those years, I have been able to continue doing what I love.

My definition of success may be a little different from some people’s.

To me, success is being able to enjoy your career and enjoy what you do.

By that definition, I consider myself very successful.

There have been so many moments when I have been able to experience the excitement of a customer seeing a completed landscape for the first time.

Just as meaningful are the compliments I receive about the people who work alongside me—customers telling me how kind they are, how hard they work, and how much they enjoyed having them at their home.

I am fortunate to be in a business where a lot of people get the opportunity to smile.

Creating With What God Gave Us

I also believe the people who work with me gain something from spending their days around nature.

We work with plants, trees, flowers, water, stone, soil, and all the other things God created.

And we have the opportunity to take those things and put them together in a way that creates something beautiful.

A couple of years ago, after a lot of encouragement from a friend and longtime customer, I decided it was time for us to return to the landscape maintenance business.

In some ways, that has given me a whole new business to watch grow.

After all these years, it is exciting to once again have something new in front of us and to see where it will lead.

Being self-employed has been a life of faith, patience, endurance, and a whole lot of prayer.

I have had the opportunity to watch and experience what I consider miracles almost every week.

There have been so many times over the years when I have wondered:

Where does all this work keep coming from?

Somehow, when we need it, it seems to show up.

I don’t believe that is simply luck.

For me, this career has been about much more than landscaping.

It has given me an opportunity to live out my faith, to learn about God’s world, and to spend my life studying and creating with the beauty He put in it.

I started as a little boy amazed that a handful of seeds saved from a marigold could become flowers the following spring.

All these years later, I am still amazed by what can grow from something so small.