Now at 30, Heritage Landscape is growing with the times 

Thirty years ago, the husband-wife team of Troy and Jamie Lewis started Heritage Landscape Design in the basement of their Moline home. Ms. Lewis remembers her husband working hard to draw customers’ landscape designs on paper. She also remembers when he had to start all over every time there was a change in those designs. […]

Thirty years ago, the husband-wife team of Troy and Jamie Lewis started Heritage Landscape Design in the basement of their Moline home. Ms. Lewis remembers her husband working hard to draw customers’ landscape designs on paper. She also remembers when he had to start all over every time there was a change in those designs. “It’s always about listening to what the customers want,” she said, adding it was an especially challenging job before that design work was done on a computer screen. Today, times have changed. Heritage Landscape Design is no longer doing business in a basement. It employs about 50 people; has an 11-acre facility at 4500 49th Ave., Moline; has a new 4,000-square-foot business building; and is a full-service design/build landscape company. Some of its work includes patios and walkways, firepits and outdoor kitchens, landscape plantings, lighting features, water features, swimming pools and much more.

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“Business has been great for us. … We’re getting new customers all the time,” said Ms. Lewis. Heritage Landscape Design owners and employees celebrated that growing business and its 30th year of helping customers on Friday, June 13, with a gathering that attracted about 50 people from the business community. That celebration included a Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour of the Heritage facility, which is located south of John Deere Expressway, near the WalMart Supercenter.  “I appreciate you beautifying the area with all of your work over the years,” Alvaro Macias, a Moline City Council member, said before the ribbon-cutting. That work of beautifying the Quad Cities region includes a wide variety of projects. Heritage has 16 work crews that are kept busy with everything from one-day landscaping jobs at residential homes to massive landscaping jobs at business buildings. In recent days, the crews have even been kept busy with landscaping work in the Rebuild Downtown Rock Island project. (Heritage’s Facebook page gives updates on that project and much other work in the region.) The event also allowed guests to see the company’s newest business building. That structure houses Heritage’s design office and was completed about a year ago. Some of the features of the new building include:

• A conference room with large-screen TV screens. The rooms are often used to meet with customers to discuss their landscaping projects.
• Cubicles for sales staff members.
• A smaller meeting room to host customers and staff meetings.
• An employee kitchen and break area.
• The design building is open 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays throughout the year. While landscaping work crews are not on the job during the winter months, the design office employees are on the job all 12 months. Often, they are kept busy designing projects and scheduling work during those winter months. Ms. Lewis said Heritage leaders often encourage their customers to use the winter months to schedule landscaping work for the coming spring or summer to ensure they get the work done. If they wait until the weather warms up, there can be long wait times to get on the schedule. For instance, the wait times at this time of year can be eight weeks or longer to get work done, she added. “We always have a good workload,” Mr. Lewis added.

In addition to the design office building, Friday’s events included a tour of the facilities at 4500 49th Ave. (Heritage has been at this site for about 25 years. Previously, the property was once used to raise horses and grow strawberries.)  The facilities include a plant nursery with several hoop structures for storing many varieties of plants; many trees (Heritage has almost 1,000 trees on site); and storage sites for landscape equipment. In addition, those sites are where employees meet at the start of each day before going out on landscaping jobs. “At around 6:45 to 8 a.m. every day, this place is chaos,” joked Mr. Lewis. He added that some of the most popular recent landscaping jobs include installing outdoor lighting, putting in synthetic turfs and swimming pool work. Even though Heritage does those jobs and many others, it doesn’t do maintenance work – such as lawn work and other chores – for landscaping. During the tour, Mr. Lewis said the company only has one lawnmower, and that is used to mow the lawn on company property at 49th Avenue. However, times could be changing. Ms. Lewis said that landscaping maintenance work might be added to Heritage’s vast portfolio in the future. That’s because it continues to be one of the chores customers continue to request. “We always tell our people to listen to the customers. Listen to what they want us to do,” she added. Another change for the future could be the business being handed over to the next generation. Ms. Lewis said that her hope is that in a few years down the road, she and her husband will step away from the business. At that time, their son, Kyle Lewis, who is currently an employee at Heritage, will continue the family tradition and be the new owner of Heritage Landscape Design.