Meet the Team
Marcé Chastain
Owner/Manager/Horticulturist
A farmer from birth, Marcé began helping on the family farm before she was a teenager—clearing fence rows, raising pigs, and driving tractors. At 17, encouraged by her father to find a summer job, she began watering on weekends at a landscape nursery down the road. The long days of watering quickly turned into seasonal maintenance work, and soon she found herself landscaping every summer in between semesters at IU, where she was studying art and history.
After graduation, hoping for a mental break before deciding the next steps in her career, she went back to work in landscaping…and never looked back. Before long, she began taking her own side jobs in Bloomington, specializing in design and major landscape overhauls. Her adventures took her to Washington State, where she worked as a Horticulturist, Assistant Designer, and eventually Groundskeeping manager for a landscape construction company.
However, she was seeing a pattern in landscaping companies that she longed to break—across the board she ran into companies that specialized in hardscape construction, but knew virtually nothing about the plants they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, the lack of adequate pay for such back-breaking labor, the disrespect workers often endure, and the failure in educating employees, fueled her distrust in the industry. Her first act of rebellion, was going back to her roots: farming.
Marcé did an immense amount of research in the following years, investigating how different landscaping companies, farms, and nurseries are run, and even starting her own vegetable/flower farm enterprise, Chastain Jardin. Over time, her research confirmed the truth she’d always suspected: that a woman-run company, staffed with trained horticulturists that KNOW plants, who are paid well and shown the respect all humans deserve, is the way to build a lasting legacy of happy people, serving other people, working with plants.
Emily Burke
Owner/Manager/Horticulturist
Emily grew up in gardens, Hilltop Garden and Nature Center being her home base in childhood. With her mother as the counselor and director, gardening was expected of her—it was in her blood. But after her first solo landscape job at 19, she began wondering if landscaping was the right path for her. It felt like endless weeds and brambles stood between herself and what she hoped to accomplish. Opting to try her hand at a different career, she studied interior design, and later became a vet tech through Purdue University, eventually landing in the corporate world of finance and lending before settling into being a mother of 5. She continued to take on occasional landscape work in the summers, and kept a small homestead she named The Anchored Homestead, never without a garden and chickens or ducks—a true gardener is never far from her garden.
What brought her back to landscaping full-time was, at first, necessity, not love. After accepting a job offer at a nursery—with the caveat of NO LANDSCAPING—she soon found herself back on residential properties. However, this time was different. She was crafting garden beds, designing and planting hanging baskets, and developing her own flower farm to compliment her ventures. After landing a position at May’s Greenhouse, she began to delve more deeply into greenhouse work, learning the names and habits of so many plants that she began to see them as independent entities to know and understand. As her knowledge grew, so did her passion.Before long, she found herself assisting a landscape construction company, where she and Marcé met, and everything began to change.
