Spring is the time when winter-weary homesteaders start fantasizing about gardening. But let’s face it, most of us should stick with our day jobs. Enter Valerie Hufnagel, president of Hufnagel Landscaping.
In 1986, when Hufnagel was about to bump her head on corporate America’s glass ceiling, she decided to do something she never thought she’d do—look seriously at her father’s landscaping business. At the time she worked for a company that fabricated custom folders. Folders or flowers? It seemed like a no brainer.
“I quit my job and started working with my father, my son’s father Don Chamberlain, two employees, a pickup, and a lawnmower,” she says. Today, Don is the vice president of maintenance and their son Jason is the vice president of landscaping.
Meanwhile, Hufnagel was beefing up her credentials, taking a horticulture and design course at Rutgers and getting a business degree at night.
Not only was she learning about plants, she was learning masonry, woodworking, and construction, so that she could build decks, patios, and retaining walls. “I always enjoyed seeing how things are put together,” she says. “I built models as a kid.”
Outdoor Obsession
“Housing is so expensive, so people want to use every inch,” Hufnagel says. “They’re not doing as much traveling, and they want that backyard to be a room April through October. Now they have fabulous choices of furniture, outside fire pits, misting systems, ponds, and other water features.”
Landscaping is a business that can weather the storms of a fickle economy. “After 9/11, I was concerned about where the business would go,” she says, “but people stayed home and wanted to make the backyard special. When they’re concerned about money, people want to have a place they can enjoy and relax in.”
Hufnagel has both commercial and residential clients. “Commercial brings in the large dollars,” she says, “but I like residential because you can build relationships with people. I still maintain the gardens I built for Hoboken people in 1986.”
She says she loves the blank canvas of a backyard. “I walk in and I know what I can do,” she says. “I listen to what the client wants. It runs the gamut between clients wanting to wear a hard hat and plant with you and the ones who don’t care about anything—just make it beautiful; here’s the check.”
Home Grown
Clients who want to be involved get taken to the stone yard and the nursery. Hufnagel says she’s guided by her clients but she sometimes has to put her boot down. “Someone really wants a dogwood, but I warn them they don’t like direct sunlight. I tell them to be aware of scorching on the leaves. They may do it anyway, but I never do something that would be disadvantageous in the long term.”
Like?
“Like planting an 80-foot tree in Hoboken. They’d be cursing me out and asking me to take it down.”
But by far the biggest mistake people make is—falling in love with grass. “It’s so much work,” Hufnagel says. “If you have a large space grass is fine, but it’s expensive in the long term. You have to mow it, water it, there is a disease and insect problem, and you have to hire me to maintain it.”
Instead, she suggests stones, patio spaces filled with plants, including “stepable” plants you can walk on that “emanate a nice fragrance.”
Think Ahead
If you want a nicely landscaped space, don’t wait until May to pick up the phone. “April, May, and June are the busiest months, and you might be disappointed that you can’t get design work until September,” Hufnagel says. “In the fall we’re planting perennial beds, planting bulbs, and getting gardens ready to go to sleep.”
She says she has six to eight weeks of down time in the winter when she’s “planning, fixing machinery, and getting ready for spring when you get full speed into action.”
For anyone thinking of living off the land, Hufnagel says, “Horticulture and agriculture are two different things. Whole Foods is right down the road.”
HufnagelLandscaping.com
(201) 869-5680
House Call
On a bright, cool morning, I accompany Valerie Hufnagel on a visit to one of her favorite gardens and also to check out Hufnagel headquarters in North Bergen. First stop, a gorgeous brownstone in Hoboken where Hufnagel says, “The character of the home and garden are representative of the clients.”
They are Adrienne Choma and Bo Dziman, who hired Hufnagel back in 2001. Hufnagel works with landscape architect Adam Hoppe on all her projects, implementing his designs. Hoppe and Hufnagel teamed up on this secluded backyard garden with two patios, lots of greenery, fences, stained glass, wood decks, and arched brick structures that mirror the ruins of a former church, which was rebuilt next door.
The small pool looks like the kind that might have koi swimming in it, but it’s definitely for humans, a beautifully shaped “cocktail” pool, not for laps but for cooling off on a hot day.
Hufnagel says the “elevations and nooks and crannies” make the space look larger than it is.
According to code, fences can be only six feet tall, but Hufnagel solves the problem with “tricks” like running horizontal wires on which ivy grows or using “cheap, disposable ferns to lengthen a wall.” Privacy is the name of the game for urban gardens.
Choma and Dziman got the idea for a garden after getting caught in a seven-hour traffic jam on the way back from Montauk, Long Island. Now, they never want to leave the backyard.
Next we hop in Hufnagel’s red Ford Escape hybrid (“If you build green, believe green”) for the trip to North Bergen. Her headquarters are in a desolate section of warehouses and storage facilities in what’s known as the “neck” of North Bergen. Outside are spaces for five trucks, trailers, a Bobcat, blue stone, bricks, wheelbarrows, tarps, shelving for flower flats, and a host of other landscaping paraphernalia. Inside are pleasant office quarters in a warehouse with lockers, a pool table, and foosball so that Hufnagel’s 25 employees can enjoy a pleasant work environment, as long as they take to heart her motto, “If you can lean, you can clean.” A huge sign reads “Team Hufnagel Masters of Perfection.”
Hufnagel herself lives in Westchester County “for the anonymity,” she says. “People have no boundaries. You’ll be sitting at a table at Amanda’s, and someone will say, ‘You know that plant?’” Hufnagel’s assistant counsels her to “park and hide.”
But the work makes it all worthwhile. “I like the challenge,” Hufnagel says. “I love it. I thrive on it. It’s the same thrill and high that doctors get in the ER.”—KR
Visit www.hobokensecretgardens.com to see more of Hufnagel’s work.