Home & Garden 2025: The life of a landscaper? We went to the LawnMaster

BY SCOTT STEPHENSON

As the owner of Lawnmaster Landscaping, Paul VanderMolen has spent over three decades transforming the outdoor spaces of Huron County into living works of art designed to shift with the seasons and improve as they age.

 

Landscaping is defined as the process of altering an existing outdoor space through the addition of plants and other features, but VanderMolen believes that what he does is just as much about the people as it is about the plants. “It’s the most fun to try to get the personalities of the people living in the house into their landscape,” he explained. “I always say that our job is to make the customers’ ideas better. So we really like it when the customer has a bit of a vision…. Then we can accentuate that, and add a lot of wild power to it, and basically over deliver to the customer.”

 

While he’s found that life as a landscaper suits him perfectly, it almost didn’t happen. As high school drew to a close, a young VanderMolen trimmed his possible post-secondary pursuits into three potential paths - and becoming a landscaper wasn’t one of them. Instead, he applied to art school, agricultural college, and for heavy equipment training. Ultimately, he chose farming. “Agriculture is my first love, and is a big love of mine,” he explained. He went into the family businesses of field cropping and raising broiler chickens. 

 

One day, he happened upon something that changed everything. “I discovered landscaping, by chance - I tripped over a crew working on a job, and got intrigued… in 1986, I hopped in, and I’ve never looked back. It’s been great - this is year 39.”
When he first started LawnMaster Landscaping, there were only a few businesses like his in the area - now, there are over 70. “We’ve really worked hard at finding a client base that likes to work with us,” he told The Citizen. “One thing that we did early on is that when we sold our work, we sold maintenance. We offered to maintain the work that we did for a year, and that has turned into ongoing relationships for many, many years with customers.”

 

VanderMolen’s plan to develop a solid customer base seems to have worked - he’s currently doing work at a home that he first landscaped in 2003. “They just reached out to have me come back and revisit their situation and how their lifestyles have changed, and adapt a new landscape to them that is going to work with them for the rest of their lives,” he explained.

 

When starting any job, VanderMolen and his team consider both the existing landscape and the movement of the people that will be inhabiting the environment he’s working to create for them. “The first thing we always do is look at the property,” he said.
After assessing the space and receiving input from homeowners, the project moves into the design phase. While 95 per cent of the drawings that LawnMaster presents to customers are crafted using platforms like DynaScape and AutoCAD, VanderMolen still does things the old-fashioned way. “Personally, myself, anything that I draw is by hand,” he admitted. “Over the last few years, I’ve been working to pass the design aspect over to Alison Terpstra, who’s been working with us for a few years. Together with Colleen O’Reilly, who is our project manager, we work together to take a landscape from ideas to implementation. Grayson Oster is also part of this on the aspect of hardscaping.”

 

Once the designs have been approved, there are three different crews that might be involved with implementing it, depending on the scope of the project. The hardscaping crew does walkways and driveways, the landscape build crew makes adjustments to the terrain, and the installation/maintenance crew, who handle all the plants and trees. 

 

Almost all of the plants they work with are sourced locally. “A lot of them are growing right here,” VanderMolen pointed out. “All of our perennials are grown on site. We source the rest from nurseries that we’ve worked with over the last 30 years - the majority of them in southwestern Ontario. And then we have one grower in Niagara, but other than that, they’re all pretty close to here, actually.” Of course, if a customer has a specific, unusual variety of something in mind, he doesn’t mind searching far and wide to find it for them.

 

He’s learned from experience which plants work really well in Huron County, and which plants are susceptible to diseases or hard to maintain. If a plant or tree tends to struggle in Southwestern Ontario, VanderMolen ensures that homeowners are aware of the risks. “We’ll have a conversation with the customer first, to make sure they’re up for the challenge.”

 

While happy to oblige most requests, working with native species just makes sense to VanderMolen. He most enjoys increasing Huron County’s population of large native plants that have been traditionally harder to find, like ironwood trees, or going with pagoda dogwoods instead of Japanese maples. “For example, Magnolia Cuminata - the native cucumber tree. We’re planting them in the area now - we call that an assisted migration. They natively do grow in Ontario, but we’re trying them out up here and seeing what happens.”

 

When creating a landscape, VanderMolen also has to consider the way that landscape will be interacting with the larger environment. “We have plants that have made their way into our landscapes that are considered invasive plants. But there’s also a lot of ornamental plants that can become invasive.” 

 

It’s all about striking the right balance. “We’re really careful with English ivy, but we still use it. We’re not using any myrtle, and we’re really slowing down on things like Periwinkle. We’re slowing down our use of burning bush, being selective how and where we plant it because it can seed out in some conditions” We try to really not use any Norway maples, especially along woodland areas, so when they produce keys, they’re not migrating in… as far as the trees that go into a landscape, we work really hard at trying to work with native plants.”

 

Climate change also needs to be taken into account; warmer winters mean more threats from things like insects and fungus. “Diseases aren’t wiped out by the super-cold weather that we used to get. So we have a lot of things that carry over,” he said. “An example would be needle-casting spruce. It’s something we never saw before, and now, in blue spruce, especially Colorado blue spruce, it’s taking them out - slowly but surely. If a customer wants one installed, then we have to be managing that.” 

 

When all the plants are in the right place, and everything’s working together, VanderMolen knows the job is done, save for maintenance. “We make sure that the home is receptive to visitors and has great curb appeal. We also want to make it into a place where people want to be. So the outdoor space is basically as fun as the inside space. That’s kind of what we work towards.”

 

VanderMolen has noticed that many people these days are beginning to make their outdoor living spaces into a larger part of their lives. The way we work and live is changing - young people have to spend bigger portions of their income on the cost of living, which means less money for travel and vacationing. “People will just escape to the backyard,” he posited. “It just might work into their lifestyle and their situation a little bit better. And there’s always opportunities to make those spaces super fun.” He’s observed an increase in requests for lighting and fire features, which means people are planning to spend more of their evenings outside. “I’m up for whatever’s coming at us. Change is good.”

 

LawnMaster Landscaping also builds a lot of environments on farmsteads “We want to basically slow winds, direct winds, decide where the snow is going to be - all those sorts of things,” VanderMolen told The Citizen. “That, personally, is kind of my favourite, because you’re trying to imitate exactly what nature would do. It’s not always my staff’s favourite stuff, but we tend to do all that work right out of the start in the spring.”

 

He does have a few professional tips to share with all the do-it-yourselfers out there. Number one: make sure you’re using the right amount of the right kind of mulch for your project. 

 

“We use a lot of mulches today,” he explained. “To control weeds, add beautification, and things like that. But if you go and get a load of chips, from Hydro One, for example, and it’s filled full of hardwood, the decarbonization of that material draws a lot of nitrogen - if it’s put on too thick, it’ll basically start to kill out perennials. It’ll definitely kill out annuals. And then it starts to cause all kinds of stress on the other shrubs that are in the garden bed as well.”

 

His second tip: if you’re drawn to the whimsical, embrace it. “I do like, in some cases, utilizing certain pieces of concrete in a garden bed,” he admitted. “If you take a raw cement pig, and make a solution of buttermilk and vinegar, and then mix it with moss and rub it all over the cement, it’ll moss up, so eventually you’ll have a nice moss-looking pig in your garden.”

 

One thing VanderMolen brings to every project is passion. “I love what I do, and I like the fact that most of the people that work here love to do what they’re doing, and it just translates into putting a great product and package out there….  And every once in a while I get pictures from customers when things are flowering and stuff, and that’s always a good feeling.”