Lauren's Garden Service and Native Plant Nursery: Plants, Design, Maintenance, Outdoor & Indoor Botanically Inspired Objects & Camaraderie Wrapped in Sustainability
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
It's a native plant garden center!
Lauren's Garden Service and Native Plant Nursery in Ellicott City has become a go to regional destination for gardeners and it is easy to see why. A robust selection of native plants, seasonal ornamentals and veggie starts, small demonstration plantings, some of the coolest topiary spheres around and a botanically themed retail shop, Cultivate, all nestled in a former church adjacent to a thrift store - it's got everything a gardener needs!
Lauren's is the defining statement that gardening with native plants has arrived. She is essentially managing an independently owned garden center that seemingly would appeal to any garden customer and her product line is 90% native plants. At long last!
The best news of all is the business continues to grow year over year - a good sign indeed. I have been so intrigued as to how Lauren got to where she is. Turns out it all started with the day she met milkweed at age 5. While gardening was not part of her childhood, she remembers that!Â
When it came time to enroll in college, Lauren was drawn to business but then also studying plants looked interesting. Along the way, she took classes at Penn State's Center for Sustainability. which opened a whole new world for Lauren. While studying herbal medicine and nutrition in grad school, Lauren took jobs maintaining gardens and, using what she learned about sustainability, her maintenance practices avoided use of chemicals, which was new to some then. Maintaining gardens led Lauren to landscape design and Lauren's Garden Service was born.
Initially working out of her home in Howard County, she launched her design and maintenance service centered on sustainability and it is growing every day. The nursery evolved when she started keeping extra plants for her design service near an old barn on her property. Inspired by the example of Herring Run Nursery in Baltimore City, Lauren started selling leftover plants to customers who wanted to plant more natives. Both the design service and pop-up native plant nursery thrived,Â
Lauren started to look for a larger place for both her design service and the growing retail business. The old church in Ellicott City provided the perfect landing spot. Today, customers can enjoy a stroll through the nursery, shopping for everything from house plants to botanically inspired household goods, take a class, or sign up for landscape design services. This is a synergetic space with several women owned businesses located adjacent to Lauren's Garden Service and Native Plant Nursery. The store next door, Twin Thrift Vintage, also embraces the sustainability theme. Lauren is quick to point out the thread that keeps these various lines of business thriving and complimentary, is the shared passion of her team for sustainability, nature, native plants and helping people!
As a home gardener, what keeps me returning to Lauren's is the ambience, the array of natives from water plants, to plugs to trees and everything in between along with knowledgeable and friendly staff. Open 7 days a week, I know if I need other gardening supplies or a gift for a friend I can get that too. You can check out their portfolio of landscape designs here (a great resource for ideas) and the nursery here.
Lauren's Garden Service and Native Plant Nursery is all about sharing their passion and collaborates with experts to offer unique classes. Check out this new offering from Young Choe, a class on creating a 'Living Frame.' You can read more about Young Choe and her classes here.Â
I asked Lauren what she dreams about for the business's future? Sustainable packaging for plants. While like many of us, she recycles every pot, accepts plastic pots for reuse and gives away plastic pots to customers, the volume of plastic in the nursery trade is a significant issue. There is a lot of R&D on this happening and, in the meantime, reuse, reuse!
At home, Lauren gardens too though she says with the help of her landscape team as she is very busy! She focuses on two rain gardens. When pressed to name her favorite native plant, she says milkweed because she is so enthralled with those silky pods and always has been. Another thing about Lauren, she says she remembers when she first met each plant. I think she is in the right line of work!
Happy Gardening
