By Julia Harmsworth

When calling for the owners of Silverfern Landscaping, you may be faced with a question: Are you looking for Carl or Carla? Turns out, the answer is both. 

Married couple and co-owners Carl Anso and Carla Oskam met back in 1999 during frosh week at Western University in London, Ont. Anso introduced himself with a nickname, but Oksam asked for his real name. “It’s Carl,” he replied “No way,” Oksam replied, “I’m Carla.” “Next thing you know, driver’s licenses are getting pulled out for confirmation,” Carl said. Carla concluded: “At which point, I told him it didn’t have my phone number on it, but…”

The couple have been together ever since. As business partners, they’re the perfect balance: Carl is the expert in the field and Carla is the professional in the office. When asked what it’s like working with their spouse, they agree it’s made their marriage stronger. “It is truly awesome. I absolutely love it,” Carla said.
Neither is a stranger to a family business. Carl grew up working summers for his dad’s architecture firm in Toronto and Carla worked for her family’s steel fabrication business. They said it’s sometimes hard to turn off the shop talk, but their two sons, Landon, 16, and Logan, 13, have helped them build necessary boundaries.

Silverfern employs about a dozen people at peak season. The commercial and residential landscape design-build company serves Guelph, Cambridge, Kitchener-Waterloo and the surrounding area. It doesn’t do property maintenance (except for gardens) and is focused on high-end residential design.

“We are super fortunate. The clientele that we get to work with — there are days that you stand there and you’re like, ‘How the hell did I ever make it here?’” Carl said.

Starting with hospitality

Carl has worked in the landscape trades his entire professional career. He previously owned a business in the Beach neighbourhood in Toronto, where he grew up. When he and Carla started a family, he sold the business and they moved to Guelph. There, he worked as operations manager for a large landscape company before striking out on his own once more.

He founded Silverfern Landscaping in 2016, named after his mother’s Kiwi background; the silver fern is New Zealand’s national plant. Carl and Carla agree that plants are the star of any landscape design. They bring a space to life.

Carla joined in 2021: “I convinced her!” Carl said. “The grass is greener over here.” At the time, Silverfern had recently entered a partnership with Pearle Hospitality, a large hospitality company in Ancaster. Carla was brought on to facilitate communications between the two offices and help support Silverfern’s sudden growth.

Through this partnership, the young company cut its teeth on large-scale, high-end commercial projects. They worked on Whistle Bear Golf Club in Cambridge, The Pearle Hotel & Spa in Burlington and a trio of mills in Ancaster, Cambridge and Elora Mill, which Anso said “was a really big feather in our cap” and earned the company a nomination at the CNLA National Awards of Landscape Excellence.

“We got thrust into large projects. You can call it magnetic luck,” Carl said. Here, Carla cut in: “You call it magnetic luck. I don’t think so. I call it who you are. You’re very good at your craft and people see that.” Carl laughed and said, “Well, thank you.”

Silverfern and Pearle Hospitality dissolved their partnership amicably after three harmonious years of business. Then, Silverfern scaled back on maintenance and focused on high-end residential construction. “That is what Silverfern is,” Carla said. She and Carl credit their staff with facilitating a smooth transition out of the partnership.

“There were definitely challenges,” Carl said. “To go through something like that… I don’t want to say it’s necessarily starting back over, but […] it’s picking your boots back up and going, ‘Okay, we’re taking the reins over, and we’re gonna have to point this ship in a different direction.’ We were very fortunate in terms of our staff. They rallied around us.”

Keeping it personal

Carl and Carla take a family-business approach to managing their team. They run Silverfern from the bottom up rather than top down. They make sure it’s easy for crews to access the owners in the office and encourage them to speak up about their own ideas. “We want to support you as an entrepreneur without the risk,” Carl said.

He loves the opportunity to enter his team’s projects (most of which are private backyards) in Landscape Ontario’s Awards of Excellence program. They have been recognized with a few awards and are in awe sharing the room with companies Carl grew up idolizing, like The Beach Gardener and Oriole Landscaping. “It’s a full circle moment,” he said.

Much of the company’s success reflects back on its history with hospitality. Carl and Carla have adapted the culture of the hospitality industry to residential projects — namely the constant pursuit of perfection — striving to provide clients with an honest, genuine and thoughtful experience. The landscaping itself, the physical doing of the work, is 10 per cent while the other 90 is client experience. That’s where true value is created.

Each project is unique. Silverfern prides itself on its ability to pull off all styles and to read the client to produce exactly what they’re looking for. The team loves connecting with clients on a personal level.

Carl said that because projects can go on for several months, “it’s like a marriage.” And, of course, a marriage is more than the honeymoon. “You have your ups and downs and in the downtimes, how do you handle those situations? Can you communicate? Can you get a resolution and are you able to push forward?”

Sometimes, clients even invite crews over for dinner in the backyard after the job is complete. “Some guys joke it’s like being on MTV Cribs,” Carl said. “That might be dating me, but it really is. You can sit there some days and go, ‘holy Christopher, I’m being paid to do this.’ That part’s special.”

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