A Journey That Began in a ‘Tosa Garage’

Tyrrell Hughes is the Founder of American Landscape. For 40 years, he served as the company’s guiding light. His experience in landscape maintenance, design and development, and snow management services are steeped in breadth. He has worked, planned, and helped lead in every aspect of the company’s existence.

Tyrrell was raised in a small Midwestern farming community and went to school in a one-room country school. His father was an early practitioner of sustainable agriculture and conservation, taking a rundown farm that would grow corn only 4 feet high and yield barely 35 bushels per acre, and through patience, hard work, suffering and practicing restorative agriculture, changed that land into the most productive in the area, winning a national award in 1947. “I remember to this day my father scooping up soil in his hands in a freshly plowed field on a Thanksgiving Day, running it between his fingers, demonstrating he could tell by feel the qualities or deficiencies of that soil.” These early experiences proved profoundly formative and ultimately led him to return to working the land, but in a different way than his father.

A Reputation Built on Strong Values

In 1973, Tyrrell began our company as a small lawn mowing operation based out of his residential Wauwatosa garage. With the goal of ultimately impacting the landscape using the principles learned in his upbringing, Tyrrell built a reputation for adding value to the landscapes of Greater Milwaukee. He developed a client base with long-standing relationships that still persevere to this day. As the company grew, so followed the need for increasingly larger facilities and more equipment. American Landscape settled at our current location in Menomonee Falls in 1989. At the time, Kohler Lane was an empty road next to a farmer’s field. Today it is part of a bustling business park which houses Kohl’s Corporate headquarters among a number of other businesses, adjacent to fully developed residential subdivisions.

In the early 2000’s, Tyrrell’s son Shea, an accomplished CPA was serving as a controller for a manufacturing company in Tennessee. Through his business experience, Shea began to have the desire to run his own company. With the timing being right, Shea and Tyrrell began having long distance discussions about the operations of American Landscape. In 2002 the talk became reality: Shea’s experience elsewhere earned him the position of managing the company and helping directly shape the next phase of American Landscape’s future.

In the time since, Shea has made it his mission to take American Landscape to the next level. Shea became the President of American Landscape in 2004. Under his management, we have seen significant growth in all key company landscape service ventures, particularly in design and development, a stronger supervisory staff, an advanced sales team, and implementation of fresh ideas for productivity, customer service, and overall viability.
One of his first principal objectives was to create American Snow Professionals. This important division of American Landscape had the ability to focus exclusively on commercial snow and ice management. During this time, Shea earned national recognition by sitting for the rigorous “Certified Snow Professional” instituted by the Snow and Ice Management Association. He became only the second individual in the state of Wisconsin to receive the designation, and supported several staff members as they followed suit.

As American Snow Professionals grew, the company expanded its facilities to include a state of the art salt storage building which protected our winter clients against the possibility of salt shortages affecting their winter service. The facility houses more than 5,000 tons of salt, allowing us the capacity standing alone against any other local competitor to literally guarantee more than an entire season’s supply of salt prior to the first snow flake falling.

At the same time as the snow operation grew, so have our landscape design and construction operation, commercial and residential landscape maintenance, as well as our arborist and tree care divisions. Today, American Landscape is a mainstay at the forefront of the Landscape and Snow contracting industries, offering comprehensive services toward total property care and improvement. In recent years, we’ve been recognized by the Wisconsin Landscape Contractors Association with Awards of Excellence in Landscape Design/Construction and Landscape Maintenance at over twenty project locations as well as National Association of Landscape Professionals for our renowned workman’s safety program.

In 2021, we performed a complete ‘gut renovation’ of our interior office space. The entire facility was reimagined so as to create a modern, efficient environment with improved use of space for better functionality as well as the incorporation of cutting edge technology. Our staff now enjoys more opportunities for smaller and larger meeting spaces, a full kitchenette, ergonomic furniture and advanced computer and audio/visual systems.
While it feels great to grow and gain recognition, the accomplishment Tyrrell and Shea both feel strongest about has been building an ever-stronger sense of company family. The company aspires for American Landscape to be the kind of place where every person is treated with human dignity and immense respect. Shea believes strongly in developing the next generation of leaders in the company and sees appreciation, loyalty and recognition as ways to show that no contribution is too small. The ultimate reward is seen in the personal and professional advancement of team members, as we all work together to continuously evolve and do it better.

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(262)252-4260
info@amerlandscape.com

N60 W16073 Kohler Ln,
Menomonee Falls, WI 53051

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A Journey That Began in a ‘Tosa Garage’

A Reputation Built on Strong Values

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