Blue Iris Landscaping: Madison, Middleton, Monona

OUR APPROACH

Blue Iris Landscaping LLC brings artistry and craftsmanship to your home or place of business. We have a very experienced designer for your plantings, hardscape and drainage problems. Blue Iris Landscaping personal are ICPI trained and certified builders of patios, driveways and Allen Block certified builders of retaining walls.

Design Approach:

We emphasize designs that uniquely fit how you want to use your yard and can create outdoor rooms to extend your home at a more reasonable price than remodeling.
The owner and main designer’s additional artistic training (Bachelors and MFA degrees in fine art) enables us to design in many different styles.
We use both native and ornamental plants in the designs to create beautiful and tough gardens that look good year round. Our designer knows the bloom times, forms and cultural needs of over 390 trees and bushes and 500 perennial plants so he is able to find the right plants for the right spot in your yard.
When designing we choose plants that are disease resistant and work together to attract beneficial insects so you do not need to use synthetic chemical sprays.
Our goal is to have attractive designs that you and your family can comfortably move in, while designing in solutions to problems like drainage issues.

How We Work:

The first step is a free meeting to look at your yard and determine how you want to use your yard and what the possibilities are within the space.
We combine your new goals with how you currently use the yard with the level of garden maintenance you are comfortable doing.
Then we draw up a design for a fee and come back to you with bids for the items you have listed as your priorities.
The bids are itemized so you can determine if you want to do it all or spread the work out over several years.

Environmental Concerns:

Blue Iris Landscaping uses organic practices for over 95% of our work. The occasional exception is the selective use of Round Up where there is no practical way to do the job organically. Like the removal of weed trees from a retaining wall where the wall would have to be torn down to remove the trees organically.
Blue Iris Landscaping LLC designs with plants that are disease resistant and attract beneficial insects to take care of the pest problems that might otherwise occur.
At Blue Iris Landscaping LLC we grow many of our own trees and bushes in our Blue Iris Nursery using organic methods. We also use the companion planting of vegetables to suppress weeds and fertilize the nursery stock.
We reuse and recycle brush and wood that is removed from various yards by having it ground into chips which we use in our nursery first as mulch and then to grow edible mushrooms that decompose the mulch into potting soil for future nursery plants.
Clean hardscape products such as cement and asphalt are taken to quarries that crush and reused the material in construction projects.
Removed plants are often saved to be replanted and the remaining refuse is either composted at our shop or taken to composting sites.
Blue iris Landscaping takes the empty pots from plants we purchase, back to nurseries that will reuse and recycle them.

Background:

Designer/Owner’s Background

Blue Iris Landscaping main designer and owner studied Landscape Architecture at the UW Madison and then transferred to the art department at the UW Madison campus
The owner and designer is trained and certified by Interlocking Concrete Paving Institute (which sets the national standards) in paver (brick) work and Allen Block Co. in retaining wall design and installation.
Has worked professionally in the landscaping field since 1991
Has a Masters of Fine Art from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Has a Bachelors Degree from the Art Dept. of UW Madison.
Shows his personal art work in juried shows all around the country.

Forman and Crew

Forman and main crew members go to training seminars to improve their skills in hardscape installation, rain gardens, plant knowledge and care.