About Us

Our Philosophy & Guiding Principles   :   About the Owner & Founder

OUR PHILOSOSPHY

With the increasing population, open lands and green space are shrinking and becoming premium. In this scenario, both public and private gardens play key roles in the well-being of humans. Most of these landscapes are neither well managed nor sustainable due to poor plant selection, soil compaction, and excess chemical usage—making such places unhealthy or unsafe for plant, human and animal life. These traditional non-sustainable landscapes may also require more frequent weeding, pruning, and other maintenance to keep them healthy and safe.

The philosophy of our organization embodies sustainability to reflect principles of conservation and an explicit acknowledgment that natural and cultural resources must be preserved, strengthened, and perpetuated. By understanding the interrelatedness between humans and environment, it is possible to create a landscape that strikes a balance between human resource consumption and resource conservation. The task of connecting man-made landscapes to nature is a challenging but worthwhile effort.

Guiding Principles

• Developing sustainable design and installation methods for renovations and/or new landscapes by utilizing the five principles of sustainability i.e., functional, maintainable, environmentally sound, cost effective, and visually pleasing.
• Demonstrating conservation practices, especially with energy, water, and natural resources.
• Promoting waste reduction and recycling.
• Selecting low water requiring plant palettes to minimize irrigation usage, and using reclaimed water wherever possible.
• Researching alternative organic or biological integrated pest control methods to eliminate the use of toxic pesticides and herbicides, which are harmful to all life, but especially to children and animals.

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About the Owner and Founder of Hortus Design Sustainable Landscapes

In her first job as Project Officer to prevent desertification due to the indiscriminate cutting down of trees, she was involved in identifying and growing drought-tolerant plants, was responsible for overseeing the maintenance of the project nursery, and for providing training and technical support to the field crews for both planting of trees and their care.

She has also been active in promoting gender sensitivity at the World Bank and Swiss Development Bank-funded Sericultural projects (Silk industry), where women and child labor are engaged in disproportionately high numbers. She initiated projects that utilized voluntary action to prevent child labor and increased the economic visibility of womens’ role in Sericulture. As Assistant Professor and as Extension Specialist in the Department of Horticulture in the ANGR Agricultural University, she taught undergraduate courses related to Edible Horticulture, Ornamental Horticulture and Landscaping and trained growers in the usage of state-of-the-art techniques in horticulture and landscape industry.

Initially working as an Estimator with an environmentally-conscious landscaping company in the Bay Area, she soon began creating landscape designs and became very much involved in Landscape Construction, developing a well-rounded knowledge base about the landscape industry in California. Due to her passion for Sustainable Landscaping and the environment, she obtained her professional Contractor’s license to offer ecological landscaping services to her clients in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The owner of the company renders all landscape designs and also collaborates with the top Landscape Designers and Landscape Architects trained in Landscape Architecture at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

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