We're on a mission to create beautiful, sustainable native landscapes.
A well-cared-for native garden is a special place. Majestic or delicate, colorful or subtly textured, each of our native plants has a personality honed from its long-held place in our ecosystem.
Our mission is to bring people and nature together using the best principles of ecological landscape design. Since 2013, Red Stem has designed and built hundreds of native outdoor spaces, combining pleasing aesthetics with knowledge of soils, hydrology, light conditions, and native plants to enrich and beautify the environment.
But the beauty of incorporating native plants into your property is only part of why we do what we do. Native plants are the basis of a healthy ecosystem. By replacing lawn, imported shrubs, and annual flowers with native plants, we support the full lifecycle of our butterflies, bees, and birds, ensuring that your gardens are full of life.
We acknowledge that the Chicago area sits on the ancestral lands of the Council of Three Fires: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, as well the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, among others. Our work with native plants in the Chicago area is rooted in traditional indigenous knowledge, plant selection, and long-standing methods of tending land and water.
We offer deep gratitude to the indigenous people who created and stewarded the complex ecological systems and gardens we know as the Chicago ecosystem. We would like to offer our gratitude and respect to the indigenous people of this area and across the Earth who continue to steward, protect and heal the land.
While your garden may seem like a tiny space, it can help solve local and global climate problems. A diverse and well-designed native garden can save pollinators, manage water, and improve your mental health.
Red Stem Native Landscapes employs a team of talented designers and plant enthusiasts who have a passion for native plants and the benefits they bring to the environment.
We believe in paying all our employees a living wage and rewarding excellence with promotions and growth opportunities. We provide subsidized health insurance, paid vacation, overtime pay, and professional development opportunities.
FOUNDER
Monica leads the Red Stem Native Landscapes management team. Monica’s fascination with wildlife and habitat began in her dad’s garden where bees, butterflies, and birds frolicked and flourished.
She earned the Master Naturalist certificate from the Morton Arboretum, took classes in landscape design and management at Chicago Botanic Garden, and was lucky to have a great mentor in native plant gardens, Art Gara of Art and Linda's Wildflowers. In 2013 she left a career in publishing to open Red Stem, hoping to fill the Chicago area with beautiful, peaceful native gardens where wildlife could find increasingly scarce food, shelter, and breeding space. Monica enjoys working with the talented community that is Red Stem’s growing staff, and when time permits, reading and hanging out with the
grandkids.
VP OPERATIONS
When Carolina’s company sent her to Chicago from her native Buenos Aires, her colleagues came to rely on her for All Problems Excel. Since joining Red Stem in 2017, she has expanded her formidable skill set and now basically keeps everything on track at Red Stem, with responsibilities from running the financial systems and bookkeeping to personnel management, scheduling, and vendor relations.
Carolina is part of Red Stem's management team. Her top priority has always been to be dependable and professional and to perform high-quality work, and we love how that translates into team efficiency and great customer service. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing and spending time outdoors with her husband and two kids.
VP OF SALES + DESIGN
Joanna is a Senior Designer, manages the Sales + Design Team, and contributes to the ongoing development of the company. Before joining Red Stem in 2019 she ran a small landscape design + build business for nine years in Chicago. Joanna takes great joy in creating landscapes that reconnect people to nature, while expanding ecological habitat in the Chicago area.
Specializing in ecological landscape design, native plant design, and water management, Joanna’s approach is inspired by indigenous ways of tending land and water. When she started in the field, she did everything from design and customer relations to planting and stewardship. Working in the gardens every day she honed her skills for recognizing the stewardship tasks and design elements that can transform a garden. Her favorite garden task is pruning shrubs and small trees. In her free time, Joanna enjoys cooking, growing plants and flowers, and spending time at the lakefront.
NURSERY MANAGER
Alesia makes sure that Red Stem’s designers and installation teams have all the native plants they need. Having joined Red Stem in 2019, she is responsible for sourcing plants from our network of suppliers and for supervising the nursery team. Her degree in environmental biology from Beloit College and her previous positions as propagation crew leader and sales and consulting associate at Prairie Moon Nursery make her uniquely qualified for this position.
Not content to rest on her laurels, though, Alesia is currently developing our retail plant sales division, which will be open throughout the growing season. You may even see her helping out at installations as she learns more about the design process. Her love for plants comes from her grandmother, who had a beautiful rose garden. After hours you can find her walking her dog, spending time with friends and loved ones, or curled up on the couch watching a movie.
ECOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE DESIGNER
Betsy joined Red Stem’s landscape design team in 2021. When creating garden designs, she draws on her earlier career as a graphic designer.
She learned about native plants and wildflower garden management while working at a suburban Chicago nature center, where she was fascinated to see how native plant communities and wildlife function together in prairies, woodlands, and wetlands—as well as gardens and parking lot islands. Betsy has also taken courses on botany and garden design at Chicago Botanic Garden. In her spare time, she volunteers at her kids’ school gardens and as a Master Gardener Intern with University of Illinois Extension in north Cook County. She also loves to read and draw. Betsy hates running, but sometimes does it anyway.
DESIGNER
Baran supports the Red Stem design process with his formidable skill set, which includes 3D drawing, sketching, modeling, and color rendering, both freehand and computer-aided. Since joining Red Stem in 2020, he has enabled quick turnaround on designs as needed.
In his free time, Baran enjoys working on and taking care of his rooftop deck and extensive container garden—a lush and relaxing retreat for summer night dinner parties and outdoor movie screenings.
NATIVE PLANT SPECIALIST
Eve works behind the scenes as the plant management team’s muscle, caring for the inventory and keeping the nursery in shape. She derives much satisfaction from having her hands in the soil, getting up close and personal with Red Stem’s multitude of plant species and the pollinators they attract. Her background in early childhood development and her prior work as a preschool teacher translate well to the patient and often messy work of caring for tiny plants.
Eve is an Illinois Master Naturalist intern and delights in learning about the unique ecology of the Chicago region. She spends as much of her free time as possible having adventures in the Forest Preserves of Cook County and along the lakefront with her daughter.
ECOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE DESIGNER
Rachel joined the Red Stem team in 2025 as an ecological landscape designer. With a background in textile design, she has a deep understanding (and love!) of texture, color, and pattern. She blends that design sensibility with a strong knowledge of native plants, informed by coursework in Horticulture and Garden Design at the Chicago Botanic Garden, along with stewardship work in Millennium Park and residential gardens throughout Chicagoland. She’s passionate about native plant communities, creating pollinator corridors across the city, and using ecological approaches to manage water in the landscape. When Rachel’s not designing gardens, you can find her tending her own or spending time with her family.
ECOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE DESIGNER
Jason joined the Red Stem team in 2022 as a Steward, focusing on caring for and maintaining our gardens. Recently, he has transitioned to the design team to focus on creating attractive and ecologically resilient gardens.
His first introduction to native plants was walking through a restored prairie at College of DuPage, where he was captivated by the sheer diversity and uniqueness of the region's plant life. This experience led him to earn a degree in Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
In his spare time, Jason enjoys taking care of his orchid collection and spending time in his vegetable garden. Aside from his plant addiction, he also likes hanging out with Pablo, his pet tortoise.
