Giovanni's Landscaping, LLC

Oct 2023

I would not recommend this team to anyone I know for the price they are charging clients. They oversell and underdeliver and are not honest people. I am deeply disappointed with how much we paid for the value delivered. Giovanni lacks professionalism, integrity, transparency, and reliability. He does not stand behind promises and was keen on trying to land maintenance services. Doing our landscaping was supposed to be a non-essential "nice to have" happy project and it was so far from this. We went way over budget (got sucked in by the sales pitch) and later dreaded every minute of working with him. Giovanni often 1) forgot details discussed or pretended to forget, 2) circumvented questions, 3) intentionally and knowingly misled, 4) used every opportunity to upsell, and 5) bad mouthed other contractors. We worked with 5-7 contractors during the pandemic on large house and landscape projects and this was by far the most frustrating project. Giovanni is extremely skilled at selling, withholding information, and misleading. We thought we could trust him and we were sadly mistaken. Before the project he made many promises. He told us he guaranteed all his work and his plants. He told us stories about all he did to help his clients "for free." In reality, after he was finished and it was clear we were not going to purchase maintenance services from them, he dodged contact and dismissed questions. We had plants in poor shape because of the location he picked to plant them. We know this because some of the same plants were thriving in areas with different amounts of light. For example, he had planted at least 5 gardenias bushes. The ones he originally planted in the sun were turning yellow while the ones in the shade were fine. Instead of offering to replant or replace them, he told us it was no longer his responsibility. He charged us 2-4 times what each plant would actually cost to inflate materials costs, rather than adding under labor or service charges because those were already exorbitant. There were some plants we didn't explicitly ask for, but he would nonchalantly ask for our approval without disclosing the price and then later invoice us $200-300 for them, telling us "we wanted them." There were plants we said we wanted, which he indeed purchased early on and stored in our backyard. However, he put them in a spot without sun for several weeks while the team dragged on with the project, and so all the plants died. By the time it was time to do the planting, he didn't replace the ones we wanted that had died. Instead he purchased other plants, ones we didn't like and didn't say a word about the dead plants even though we knew they had died. The plants were probably no longer available in stores because the season had passed. I asked if he was going to get replacements and he responded with "Oh you wanted those?" We have since replaced all of these plants. They dragged the project on for several weeks longer than what they originally said it would take, not showing up for many days without notice. When they closed on another project, they rushed through finishing up our project in a few days so they could move on to the next project. This last part was what we cared the most about and wanted to be more involved with, which I had voiced from the beginning (choosing plants and the placement for them). They failed to tell us the hedges we picked were extremely slow growing while we were weighing the different options presented to us. While choosing, they convinced us to pick the smaller pots to help us "save money." I realized now he was trying to get a higher margin off each plant. They would need a lot more of the smaller size to fill the area and they were able to charge us more per plant to stay within an allocated budget (about 50-60 individual plants alone). Planting privacy hedges was probably the most important part of the project and what kicked off us wanting to do our landscaping in the first place. If they had disclosed this information upfron

May 2023

Pro: Easy to schedule estimate appointment on website. Con: After agreeing to send me an estimate. No response. No email. No estimate. No nothing. I called and emailed and still waiting. Unprofessional. If you wanted to decline the job please provide me with the courtesy of informing me. Even if I was contacted now, I would decline. The entire consult was a waste of time. Time that I could have used to find another landscaping company. Sad.

Dec 2021

Giovanni and his crew completely relandscaped our backyard this summer. New plantings, irrigation, a fence and paver patio and walkways. Everything is good except for the Pavers, from the very beginning the polymeric sand has washed out between the pavers. Giovanni came back once to fix it. But it is continuing to wash out from just normal rainfall. He won't respond to our emailed requests to correct the problem. He does not stand behind his work as he promised. For this reason I would not recommend him.