Digging up the garden-care niche yields treasure: Landscape maintenance aims at working women

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A few years ago, when she was out working in her yard, Amy Semple fell into an over-the-fence conversation with a neighbor, a woman who was as avid an amateur gardener as Semple herself.
“We both said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do this for a living?'” Semple recalls. “So I started doing some research.”
After scrutinizing the local market for some months, she found that there was no shortage of Rochester-area people willing to pay someone to weed, fertilize and mulch their gardens, but that many would not or could not afford to pay rates charged by big landscaping firms.
“There was a niche we could fill,” Semple concluded.
But some months later, when the 37-year-old was ready to start Morning Dew Gardens, the landscape maintenance service she has now run for the past four years, her neighbor had moved and was no longer available.
“So when I started,” Semple says, “it was just me.”
As her clientele grew, she recruited family members-two sisters and her mother-as helpers. This season, for the first time, she hired a non-family member as a helper.
Morning Dew Gardens does garden upkeep throughout the Rochester area. Most of her business has been residential, Semple says. But she did her first commercial job this year, putting a long-neglected side garden at the Hochstein School of Music & Dance on North Plymouth Avenue back into shape.
Semple first attracted clients through ads in Rochester Woman, figuring the locally published magazine “really hit my target demographic.” She describes typical Morning Dew clients as working women and mothers who want a garden but lack the time, inclination or skills to do the upkeep. Many hire Semple after watching the established gardens or plantings the builder put in at a home they moved into a few years ago steadily go downhill.
Semple, who first learned gardening skills from her mother and grandmother, charges $25 an hour to feed perennials, prune shrubs, cultivate, set beds of annuals or do whatever regular maintenance might be needed to keep a garden in bloom. She visits each client’s garden at least once a week.
Of the 20 or so regular clients Semple has amassed, her biggest job is for a four-homeowner group on a six-residence private drive in Pittsford. Her smallest is for a retired woman in a small condominium.
Semple has done garden designs and installations from scratch, helped clients place new beds and worked to maintain existing designs.
“I do whatever the client wants,” she says.
She does not mow lawns or do major landscaping. But Semple has developed relationships with several landscapers and can help arrange installations of retaining walls or other major work.
Morning Dew Gardens remains a seven-month-a-year business. Semple ceased the current season’s operations a few weeks ago, she says.
Semple, however, plans to expand into a year-round service by offering indoor plantings maintenance to residential and commercial customers. That move is currently at a research stage.
In the meantime, Semple has for the past three years also held down a part-time job as the assistant manager of the Rochester Public Market.
“It’s steady work,” she says, “and for now, I plan to keep it.”
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Fast Start is a biweekly feature focusing on young entrepreneurs. Send suggestions for future Fast Start stories to Associate Editor Smriti Jacob at [email protected].

11/09/07 (C) Rochester Business Journal