We thoroughly enjoy collaboration with clients, to create all sorts of gardens; garage-rooftop gardens, vegetable gardens, full-on garden plans that integrate trees, shrubs, and flower borders. We design hardscape to create structure and flow in clients'​ yards and provide beautifully built wood structures for client's gardens. Native plantings in my designs offer resilience and habitat for local pollinators while also recognizing the eco-functional aspects of many annual and ornamental plants. In educting our clients. we often find we also learn new things!Integrating Rain Gardens into home landscapes is a wonderful way of creating eco-functional elements and pollinator friendly gardens for residential properties. These gardens serve both the client and nature. Rain gardens can solve puddling and small scale flooding problems in our client's properties and help neighborhoods by allowing water run-off to slow, spread and infiltrate near where it lands. Hundreds of gallons of water can be kept out of the over stressed city storm water systems. In October of 2018, our 1426 Mulford St. project in Evanston, officially received it's LEED Residential Platinum Certification, becoming the first Residential platinum home in the City of Evanston. We designed, project managed and oversaw the installation of this lovely residence and actually assisted in getting the extra points for Platinum status by our landscaping choices!. We are certified to install the LEED approved LiveRoof Green Roof module systems. Julia's experiences include: Owner of the Spirited Gardener, Inc., founded in 2005 with occasional time at other companies to grow my experience. I'm also the Principal Designer and Project Manager, working with other local installers to achieve lovley collaborations with my residential clients. Landscape Designer for Green Edens Horticultural Services, LLC (2017); Senior Landscape Designer for DigRightIn Landscaping (2016) where Rain Water management dominated many of my designs; Annual floral & perennial designs for the City of Chicago Park District as an employee of Moore Landscapes (2012-2013), including the Cancer Survivor Knot Garden perennial planting design; Spirited Gardener and Aviv Gardening perennial garden and hardscape design for residential properties & condominiums; manager for an Urban Farm Training Program.