Joseph Hillenmeyer says that while his family legacy got him started in landscaping, it has been his passion for garden design that has made his business successful. Hillenmeyer’s family is well-known in the area for all things garden-related. His father, Louis, was one of the Hillenmeyer brothers who owned Hillenmeyer Nursery, a 175-year-old landscaping and plant nursery business. In 2001, brothers Chris and Stephen bought Louis out and transitioned the company from a retail and growing operation to a landscape design and maintenance service.
Joseph Hillenmeyer
As Louis Hillenmeyer continued to explore his passion for cultivating plants, Joseph developed his own love for landscape design. After a year working in a private garden in New Zealand and another in a private arboretum in Turkey, Joseph planned to move to England to work in gardens there. But his father encouraged him to run the family’s seasonal garden center in Lexington. Joseph never made it to England. Instead, he started designing gardens for clients, partially to utilize what was on the floor of the garden center and encourage sales. That business has evolved into the present-day Joseph Hillenmeyer Garden Design.
Henkel
Recently, he’s brought on new designers, including Bill Henkel, former owner of the noted landscape design firm Henkel Denmark, which was acquired by Landscape Workshop in 2018. Henkel began his career at Hillenmeyer Nursery after graduating from the University of Kentucky. Henkel said he’s excited to be able to do what he loves and to join Hillenmeyer at the firm.
“I thought this is what I know how to do; what I love doing. I feel like I’m too young and too interested and energetic to retire… I don’t think that’s good for anybody to just shut down something that they’ve nurtured for 40 or 50 years,” Henkel said.
His focus, as it is with the rest of the company, is to bring together a client’s ideas and vision with plants.
“Those projects are all about site analysis and program development,” Henkel said. “I need to know what you’re looking for, what are your ideas? What do you need to do with the space? Then I figure out what of that we can plug into this program to make it fit the space. It’s got to have not only function to be aesthetically pleasing, but provide some other function like privacy, or shade or seasonal beauty.”
Henkel said it’s not about following trends, but about finding what gives the client the most value for their dollar.
“We’re putting together landscapes and environments that should last for 50 years and get better every year if they’re properly managed, and trees that should live for over 100 years,” Henkel said. “The most important thing, when I get right down to it, is, are we delivering real value to them? Is this something that this client is willing to invest in, and feels good about making that investment, and then when we’re finished with it.”
Henkel’s experience will add to the company by taking them back to the family roots, Hillenmeyer said.
“Bill had the great fortune of working with my grandfather, my great uncle, my dad, and my uncles — he had a history with the family business that I never had the opportunity to have,” Hillenmeyer said. “There’s a full-circle reality of us getting to work together. Now, to be able to have him here to mentor me and to work with our team, it’s been a lot of fun and, I think, an interesting turn of events that a lot of people would never have predicted.”
With clients in 13 states, the company’s landscape designs grace gardens from Lexington to Pittsburgh and from Utah to Florida, Hillenmeyer said. As the business has grown, though, his role has changed.
“At a certain point, I realized that I had no business running the day-to-day operations of crews and trucks, so that evolved into a design firm managing the projects,” he said.
That also led to starting Hortus Gardens, a complementary business focused on landscape design, installation, and maintenance.
“We could not find the right people to install our gardens or we were subcontracting masonry to install pools or to do irrigation and tree work. They were all great, but finding people that were passionate about properly installing these gardens, they were hard to find, so we started a separate company to handle that,” he said.
Above all, Hillenmeyer said, is his passion for landscape design.
“The culture that we’re building within our companies is about a passion for what we do,” he said. “We’re in business, so we have to be profitable. But that is not our drive. Our drive is to make money so that we can build the business and the culture that we want, not build a business so that we can make money.”
With the business’s focus and growth managed, Hillenmeyer said the company is now looking to the future. One of the bigger projects they are working on, he said, is landscaping at Lane’s End Farm.
“We’ve been there for the last year and continue to have a good bit of work to do there,” Hillenmeyer said. “That was a really big honor to be asked to do that by Mrs. Farish … the work that they have done has withstood the first 40 years of the farm’s history, and she tasked us with getting the farm ready for the next 40 years.”
Hillenmeyer said his company will be landscaping around the main house, respecting what has been done, and taking the landscape back to show off the architecture of the home, as well as handling the landscaping around the stallion complex.
His next focus, he said, will be to move into commercial landscaping.
“Right now we are 90 percent focused on high-end residential work, but I’m really interested in pushing into some hospitality work. I feel like that’s a sector where our higher-end residential skill set applies on a commercial level,” he said. “We want to find clients that want to engage their workforce or their clients with more engaging landscapes.”