Green Business
of the Week
October 19, 2008
EcoGardens
When you’re a big box store and you have 70,000 square feet of roof space that you want to turn green, where do you go? In the case of the only Wal-Mart within the city limits of Chicago, you call EcoGardens. They transformed that roof, another 10,000 square foot roof on a downtown office building, and right now they’re even working on the top of Lake Forest High School.
EcoGardens operates on the philosophy that nature already provides us with strategies to minimize pollution. Their job is to find ways to utilize these natural processes when creating urban landscapes. Sustainability starts on the drawing board, is the focus during the installation and continues throughout the maintenance phase. This company’s motto is “Inventing Urban Spaces in step with nature.”
Greg Raymond founded EcoGardens to create beautiful and earth-friendly gardens in the city. The company encourages the use of native plants, as well as natural compost, fertilizer, and pest control to achieve biodiversity in their landscapes. They carefully source materials to insure that they are non-hazardous, reuse as much and they can and recycle the rest. Their gas-run equipment even meets California emissions standards and they use electric-powered, rechargeable equipment whenever possible.
With a twenty-five member staff that includes landscape architects, horticulturalists, and even a biologist, EcoGardens goes even further to make your home and the world a greener place to be. Their specialists create green roofs, rooftop gardens and rain gardens.
Rainwater harvesting is incorporated as a regular part of the company’s designs. The company even designs low-volume and drip irrigation systems. Talk about high tech: how about a watering system that knows the weather AND how much water your plants need!
If you want to experience the height of green landscaping, check out EcoGardens by visiting their newly renovated website www.ecogardens.com. Want a more direct conversation? Call 312 550-5577 and ask for founder Greg Raymond. You can also email at info@ecogardens.com.
