The Common Planting Garden is a living classroom at our Plymouth headquarters — a hands-on extension of a resource we built years ago for our own team. It pairs a physical garden with the Egan Common Planting Guide, the online flipbook, and two employee exams into a single way to learn.
The garden features some of the plants from the guide, planted right at our front door. Crews can walk it, ask questions, and watch live demonstrations of how to prune and cut back each species correctly.
The guide itself covers facts about each plant, photographs, and the common pests and diseases to watch for. Two tests — plant identification first, then care and differences — turn that reading into real, confident skill.
It all comes back to one of our core values: Nurturing. Time spent learning here is less time spent guessing on a client’s property. When we say we’re professionals, we mean it.
A few years ago, we developed our own version of a common planting guide. This wasn’t built for a blog, and it wasn’t built for a client. It was built for our employees, right here. We wanted a resource our team could turn to in order to learn more about the plants they’d be working on and around on client properties — the space and the tools to feel confident in their own skill sets.
Alongside the guide, we created two exams for employees to take. We’ve encouraged everyone — whether they’re sitting in the office or out in the field — to work through both, regardless of how long they’ve been with us or how much time they spend around plants day to day.
The two tests aren’t meant to be taken in isolation. They’re a progression: the first builds the foundation, and the second builds on it. You can’t truly care for a plant until you can name it, and you can’t name it until you’ve spent time learning to tell one from another. Taken in order, they move an employee from recognizing a plant on sight to understanding exactly what it needs to thrive.
"Nurturing" is one of our core values, and we're always looking for ways to invest back into our people. The Common Planting Garden is one of the many ways we do it.
Below is the full Common Planting Guide, the same resource our team uses to learn the plants they work on and around every day. Flip through to explore each entry, complete with photographs, key facts, and the common pests and diseases to watch for.
Take your time! It’s built to be returned to, not read once.
At Egan Landscape Group, we’re more than a landscape company — we’re a team of professionals committed to transforming outdoor spaces while building lasting relationships with our clients and one another.
Everything we do is guided by seven core values, captured in the acronym R.E.L.I.A.N.T: Reliability, Excellence, Leadership, Integrity, Accountability, Nurturing, and Teamwork. They aren’t words we mention at onboarding and forget; we live them every day. The Common Planting Garden grew straight out of one of them: Nurturing, and our belief that investing in the growth of our team is how we take better care of the landscapes, and the people, in our care.
