Our Story.
Who We Are
Hi! Rayna and Jamie here.
We write about gardening and sustainable landscape design.
Our goal is to help YOU transform your garden from grass to greatness.
No outdoor space to your name? No problem (as millennials, we get it).
We love houseplants and balcony gardens too.
Dig into the blog, or keep reading for more about us.
The Full Story
Beginnings
Greensaus is a sustainable landscape design blog. In many ways, it is also a love story (ours).
Rayna was a suburban kid who loved Mickey Mouse and smiley faces. She grew up wanting to be a painter.
Jamie was a city kid living a country life. His childhood was spent catching frogs and snakes in Toronto’s parks and ravines.
So, how did the wayward painter and the urban wildman end up together and start a blog?
Let’s rewind to three rounds of Oaxaca Old Fashioneds one spring evening back in 2017.
Days away from the end of our first year as Master of Landscape Architecture students, we were both looking to blow off steam. Already friends at this point, we strolled over to El Rey, a gem of a bar nestled into a corner of Toronto’s Kensington market.
Round one was ordered, and we took our seats.
Conversation was the easiest thing in the world. It wasn’t a date – we were just two burned out grad students enjoying each other’s company.
Round two.
Rayna discovered that Jamie was secretly a nerd. Jamie discovered that Rayna had the best laugh in the world.
Round three.
This casual hang was quickly taking on life changing significance. Who is this amazing person? Where did they come from?
Bill paid.
We sat down as friends. We said goodnight as soulmates.
Foundations
Fast forward three years, and we were living together in Parkdale (in our opinion, Toronto’s coolest hood). We had a beautiful house, a small front and back yard, and jobs that were driving us crazy.
After earning degrees in fashion, environmental design, Rayna had found her calling in landscape architecture. An opportunity to work as a designer while saving the world with plants – what could be better?
In truth, a day in the life of a Toronto-based landscape architect is much less glamorous.
Toronto is one of North America’s fastest growing cities, with the most cranes of any city in North America. As a result, Rayna quickly found herself up to her eyeballs in condo projects.
Feeling uninspired, Rayna sought motivation elsewhere, getting involved in our neighborhood community. A series of community and non-profit grant awards put Rayna on a new path as an equity-focused landscape designer.
Jamie graduated a year after Rayna and witnessed first hand her dissatisfaction with a landscape design career in condo land. Despite a scholarship, an academic research grant, several publications, and a master’s degree, Jamie decided that a landscape architecture career wasn’t for him.
Instead, he built a shed.
This wasn’t his first foray into gardening or DIY construction. Throughout highschool and university, Jamie spent several summers working at the Jardins de Metis, an internationally acclaimed garden built by Jamie’s great, great grandmother.. He also ran a Toronto-based landscaping business during the summer before starting grad school.
Leaning on this experience, Jamie set to work. Step one was manually re-grading our entire backyard with a shovel and rake. Once the ground was leveled and the resulting metric shit ton of dirt was wheelbarrowed away, Rayna jumped in to help design the structure and develop planting strategy.
Despite Jamie’s confidence that he would have the project wrapped in a week, the shed took the better part of the summer to build…
Still, the damn thing was built like a Roman fort and looked nice enough to live in, featuring DIY Shou Sugi Ban (a Japanese wood charring technique) cedar siding, a green roof, and a herb garden above the garbage bin storage area.
Shed finished (finally), Jamie jumped into job searching mode. Determined as he was to land a gig outside the typical landscape architecture nine to five, Jamie joined a local drone pilot training business on a hunch drones would become popular land mapping and surveying tools.
Lockdown Hustle
Cue spring 2020 and the global pandemic. Repeated lockdowns and work-from-home mandates across Canada had us spending nearly all of our time at home. Aside from cooking, drinking, and binge watching Homeland (must-watch TV), we jumped at the improving weather to kick-start step two of our garden makeover.
By the end of the summer, we had raised beds, a vegetable garden, a patio, and a pond with goldfish “rescued” from a local park. The neighborhood racoons quickly became our nightly nemeses, as a family of them put in WORK trying to snack on the goldfish. To their credit and to our surprise, the fish survived.
Meanwhile, our careers were taking off.
In addition to her day job, Rayna co-founded Common Space Coalition, an equity-based landscape design non-profit org, with a former grad school classmate. Two major grant awards funded Rayna’s local community design research through a series of impactful community engagement projects.
This work propelled Rayna and her co-founder to host an educational webinar hosted by the CSLA (Canadian Society of Landscape Architects). Rayna was also featured in the magazine Landscape|Paysages, where she published a piece advocating for the importance of equity-focused design in city building.
After eighteen months of hustle, Jamie had worked his way into an executive role at his company, having overseen a major restructuring of the business. Feeling that the training business was too far removed from ecology and design, Jamie bet on himself and started his own business providing drone mapping and inspection services across southern Ontario.
We were working our asses off, but it felt good.
Taking note of our unconventional careers and early successes, we were both invited to join several different design studio review panels by University of Toronto landscape architecture faculty.
Jamie also became a part-time adjunct instructor at the University of Toronto, teaching a master’s landscape design studio about drone mapping for improved landscape design and ecology.
Packing Up Our Lives
After two lifetimes in Toronto and two years of pandemic lockdown, we were going stir crazy. A change of scenery was in order, and we were both keen to get a taste of life in the US.
What followed was a 6-month Google search comparing everything from the supposedly ‘hip’ vibe in Austin to the balmy weather and emerging tech bro scene in Miami. Rayna had several promising round-one interviews with companies throughout the South and the Midwest. Her first callback from a boutique design firm in Portland, OR.
With two years of hardcore hustling in pandemic lockdown behind us, West Coast chill and the proximity to boundless nature held some serious appeal. In the days before Rayna’s final interview, we found out everything that we could about Portland, a city we’d never set foot in before.
Rayna got the gig. We were headed west!
Greensaus
Starting a business together was a goal since our first boozy night in grad school.
With some hefty bills from moving and furnishing our pad with a jungle of houseplants, the idea of starting a side hustle took on new significance.
A blog was the perfect place to start.
We founded Flow State Creative LLC in 2022, and Greensaus was launched a year later.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. We’re grateful you’re here.
Dig into the blog or drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.
Rock n’ roll!
Rayna and Jamie