Woman brings landscaping business from Florida to West Michigan

SPRING LAKE — What do you do if your landscaping is lacking and you don’t have the time or knowledge to fix it?

You call Claudia Perez-Gianoli.

Perez-Gianoli, originally from Peru, attended school for landscaping in her hometown of Lima two decades ago.

“At the beginning, I took a workshop about garden design, and I was so hooked on it,” she said. “I love it so much, so I decided to get into the program. Since then, I was doing gardens and had my little company.”

Perez-Gianoli designed, installed and maintained landscaping in Lima, the arid, coastal capital of Peru.

“It’s a different kind of planning,” she said. “It’s a very urban city.”

When Perez-Gianoli married her husband, David, she moved to Arizona — and then, to Florida. The couple had a baby boy and Perez-Gianoli restarted her landscaping business, CPG Landscapes.

“While we were living in Florida, we started looking for a place with a better standard of life,” Perez-Gianoli said. “We were looking around, and Grand Rapids and West Michigan were in the top 10. Everything all around was beautiful, and now we live in Spring Lake.”

Perez-Gianoli no longer installs and maintains her landscaping plans, but rather draws up detailed plans for homeowners to carry out themselves.

“I’m a virtual designer,” she said. “I provide professional advice and recommendations. Nowadays, when it’s very difficult to try to find somebody to execute a plan, or you want to do it yourself, and you can’t find a landscaping company because they’re so busy, that’s what I do.”

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