About Us

Hello everyone and welcome to our our organically inspired landscape and home design/build website. Our website continues to evolve like a garden or home improvement and we invite you to check back to see the updates as they occur. Our Connecticut based company works throughout the Northeast creating affordable, natural, organic gardens and landscapes as well as  beautiful, properly budgeted interior projects.

We are committed to keep our carbon footprint as small as we can in life, home, and garden. We designed this website to minimize the psychic, emotional, and physical footprint on you as you peruse our pages. You see, whenever we design anything, we believe that it isn’t about what is created but the feeling you get from that creation. We hope to inspire you in some way to improve yourself and your home by taking small steps towards positive change without breaking the bank. Quality does not mean expensive, it means created with thought and pride.

Please take a moment as you stroll through our website to see all our posts and pages where you can find ‘all things green and garden’. All the blue words on the left can be clicked on to bring you to more items enjoyable and informative. Type a word in the search box (i.e.: lighting, gardens, paint, tile, stonework, ,tips…) to find something of interest. The Eco-Shop has all our recommendations for things you need in your home and garden that are environmentally friendly.

Make sure you sign up for our monthly ‘Garden Greenline Eco-Letter’ delivered straight to your inbox and subscribe to the RSS (top right corner) so you will be automatically notified of new postings by yours truly. Your comments are appreciated and we will respond to them.

All photos are taken by Ian and are available for purchase in any size high quality print, with or without a frame. You can also click on any photo to see it enlarged.

Maureen Haseley-Jones, aka The English Lady, and her son Ian J. Sveilich are members of a family of renowned horticultural artisans whose landscaping heritage dates back to the seventeenth century.

She is the founder of the well-known and established company The English Lady Landscape and Home that works throughout the Northeast. Today Maureen is a much credited and sought after designer and expert in all matters green and garden. Her “cheeky, self-effacing style as the “garden guru” on WRCH Lite100.5 FM radio has earned her a wide fan base.

Maureen lectures throughout Connecticut on a broad range of landscape design and environmentally holistic topics. She also writes timely articles for various newspapers and magazines throughout the state, in addition to having her own weekly gardening columns in “The Shoreline News” and “The Valley Press” and begins a three part series about vegetable gardens, in the spring of 2009 in “Nutmeg Magazine.”

Home Living Connecticut Magazine referred to Maureen as “one of Connecticut’s best known Landscape Designers and radio personalities.”

Beginning in 1648 their family were tenants at Powys Castle in Wales and worked the landscape for the Herbert family who were in residence. In 1680 they refined their craft under the auspice of renowned architect William Winde who designed the terrace gardens in the style of Renaissance Italy’s landscapes. Powys Castle is still considered by many landscape experts to be the best example of seventeenth century gardens in Britain today.

Maureen learned her creative design skills and horticultural acumen from her mother and grandmother and was “speaking garden” from the time she could talk. She honed her construction skills while working in the family business in the U.K. Her formal horticultural training was at the world-renowned Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew in Surrey.

The New York Sunday Times said of Maureen that “one of life’s unexpected experiences was discussing manure with an English Baroness,” and Connecticut magazine found Maureen “anything but tweedy.”

Baroness Maureen Haseley-Jones, who also has an honors degree from the London Guildhall School of Music and Drama, once understudied on the English stage the famed actress Angela Lansbury of “Murder She Wrote.” She also qualified to race on a Formula One team in Europe, raced a Lotus in the Monte Carlo rally as well as Mini-Coopers in road rallies in Northwest England.

Maureen came to the United States as a stewardess on TWA airlines and later became a production consultant/writer on the CBS soap opera The Guiding Light in New York City.

Ian J. Sveilich (pronounced Svy-lick) is the Creative Director and CEO of The English Lady Landscape and Home. Not only does he have more than four hundred years of ancestral history in landscaping running through his veins but he was also taught by the best, his world class master gardener and landscape designer mum.

Ian’s natural talents began to manifest early in his childhood when he could be found taking things apart; from clock radios and stereos to lawnmowers and bikes; all so he could know how they worked. Once when he was barely seven he dragged a dishwasher left on the side of the road a mile to his house just to take it apart.

If something was broken, a door jamb or cracked shelf, or if a faucet or pipe leaked, little Ian would take to fixing it. And if his early engineering mind couldn’t quite do the trick he would read, trying his best to decipher diagrams and descriptions until he finally got the gist. While other kids his age were running on the play ground Ian was often found with Popular Science magazine or in the library reading a book on how to build stone walls. Ian was even found behind the school yard building one to figure it out!

Providence was kind in bestowing the innate and natural gifts in understanding all things home and garden. When Ian was fourteen he worked his first construction site. He was unique from day one as he was the only construction worker who could frame a roof, and also tell you the appropriate flowers, shrubs and interior colors that beckoned to be there.

Ian attended SUNY Binghamton pre med inspired by his father who was an orthopedic surgeon. Ian loved the world of medicine and looked forward to learning the necessary skills to help mend people.  And although his path would change from hospital hallways to garden walkways, to Ian it was all the same. From the perspective of his renaissance spirit bringing a garden back to life,  repairing deteriorating structures, removing toxic plants, and nurturing the soil with healthy nutrients was no different than than the carpentry of the human body.

Ian realized early on that the tools of landscape and home improvement were not all that different from the tools of the physician, and it wasn’t long before Ian’s passion for the entrepreneurial life, and for improving, beautifying, and fixing people’s everyday needs as a home and landscape design/builder won out. He grew to merge the best of both worlds passed down to him by joining his mother in Connecticut and helping to grow the garden company his mother began into The English Lady Landscape and Home.

Ian has an engineering mind, designers eye, and the construction, stonework, and landscape skills one requires to create long lasting works of exceptional, if not simple beauty; a continuation of his centuries old European legacy in all things home and garden.