Heidi Heiland has made a career—indeed a life—out of gardening. She says it’s something she fell into as a teenager, but perhaps it was meant to be. Her great-grandmother gardened on an East Coast property designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of the first prominent female landscape designers. Growing up in Minnesota, Heidi found herself drawn to the craft.
As a 16-year-old working as a “water girl” for a townhome developer in the late 1970s, she noticed all the gardens relied on the same three annuals: red salvia, yellow marigolds and white sweet alys-sum. There has to be more than this, young Heidi thought. So at age 17 she began her own gardening business, Heidi’s Lifestyle Gardens, to offer more creative planting to the community.
Heidi did not study horticulture or landscape design at a university, but over the course of her career she has earned many certifications and received awards for her
