Landscaping Supervisor, Certified Landscape Technician (With Lawrence Park since 1996)
Larissa’s career with Lawrence Park began in 1996. At first, she helped the Maintenance crews during the busy spring and fall cleanup periods. In 1999, she came on board full-time in the Landscaping department and began four years of night courses at Humber College in horticulture and landscape design. Still an avid course-taker, she enjoys attending the one- and two-day workshops that Landscape Ontario offers each winter.
Because her husband works for an airline, she travels often—but even then, she can’t stop thinking about ways to do her job better. “I get a chance to see urns and plant material in other parts of the world. I love tropical woodlands and rock formations. I get quite excited and take lots of pictures.” (Good ones, too. She studied photography at Ryerson.) She then applies these ideas to the urns she creates while taking into account your preferences and the look of your house, and the style of your garden.
With urns, “If something’s really popular and has been featured in décor magazines, everyone will want it, but I don’t want everyone to have the same thing.” So she’ll arrange the elements differently and make each client’s urns unique, whereas “Some companies do the same thing for everybody.”
She loves that Lawrence Park trains its people so well. “Some companies just tell you what to do and don’t teach you why… but people like to be experts in their field and be able to answer clients who ask why they’re doing something.” For example, one of her clients complained that her big-leaf hydrangea wouldn’t bloom. It turned out that another garden care company had cut the bush back to the ground instead of pruning it selectively. “They didn’t know that the flowers only grow on old wood!”