By Janet Wight
Landscape Love is a south Minneapolis design and build landscaping company specializing in residential projects, while its sister business Hiawatha Supply is a bulk landscape supply yard for both residential and retail customers.
St. Anthony Park residents Nan and Steele Arundel are co-owners of these two community-focused businesses.
Along with their sons Junah (11) and Fields (8), the Arundels have lived in St. Anthony Park for three years. They moved to the neighborhood from Minneapolis, where Steele grew up. (Nan was raised in Helena, Montana.)
Landscape Love can handle any landscaping project that encompasses outdoor space, Nan explained. This includes kitchens, patios, decks, retaining walls, fences and saunas.
Supplies needed for those kinds of projects—including mulch, soil, rock and firewood—are available from Hiawatha Supply. There is also a disposal service, she added.
The two companies together have eight full-time staff members along with a stable seasonal crew of about two dozen.
The Arundels split responsibilities for managing these businesses: Steele runs the design and Hiawatha Supply teams. Nan does everything else, including project management, where she takes the landscape designs and makes them happen, managing each detail along the way.
Nan is also responsible for culture and team building. In fact, that is her favorite part of business ownership.
“I love getting to create a place that celebrates all humans and getting to create an incredible, healthy workplace culture,” she said. “We do it differently, being much more welcoming, and open, and playful, being a community hub rather than just a place of retail.”
The couple also prides themselves on creating and maintaining good communication with its customers, something that Nan contended is a competitive advantage for Landscape Love.
“We communicate really well all the way through the entire process,” Nan explained, adding “We do what we say we are going to do.”
Most of the two businesses’ clients live in Minneapolis and St. Paul along with the first-ring suburbs. The company already has many landscaping projects scheduled for the St. Anthony Park area this summer.
“We’re really good urban landscapers,” Nan said.
Both Nan and Steele come from entrepreneurial families, but neither of them ever imagined they would own a thriving landscaping business.
When they started Landscape Love in 2006, Nan and Steele were excited to be working together outside doing all of the projects themselves. The couple had no idea their businesses would become a lifetime endeavor, she noted.
Nan and Steele still enjoy working hard while the summer sun shines and then traveling in the winter months when business slows down. The family’s favorite vacation spot is Troncones, a seaside village located on the Pacific coast of Mexico.
Besides traveling, Nan’s hobbies include flower gardening and swimming in the couple’s backyard pool. Steele favors playing guitar and singing, mountain biking and participating in ice sports.
The family enjoys residing in St. Anthony Park.
“In a beautiful way it was like moving to another country even though we came from south Minneapolis,” Nan said. “This feels like such a wonderful home and neighborhood to live in.”
Janet Wight is a regular freelance writer for the Bugle.
Photo caption: These photos show the kind of landscaping work that Nan Arundel’s firm Landscape Love can do. This landscaping was done at Arundel’s home in St. Anthony Park. Photos by Jasper Lazor.
