Natural Environments

This was a complete scam. Ron Zander, company owner, came to our home for a $175.00 upfront consultation fee, which we paid in good faith. My husband and I spent about an hour with Ron going over the various things we would like done to the property including drainage, outdoor entertainment area, and landscaping. Ron stated his next course of action would be to get his "gutter guy" out to measure so we could move forward with addressing our drainage issues prior to landscaping, etc. Prior to leaving, he attempted to sell us his $1,500.00 landscape design fee, which we (thankfully) declined, deciding to wait to plan that with him after we fixed the drainage situation around our home. It has been four months now and despite numerous attempts to reach out to Ron, we either get no answer or a text stating he is out of town and out of range. I would strongly reccomend going with another landscape company. I am just glad we did not pay this fraud more than the $175. LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKE!!!!

Other than the price of the estimate ($225, whereas all the other contractors we've worked with have provided free estimates), our initial dealings with Natural Environments were fine and Ron Zander seemed to know what he was doing. We finally received our estimate two weeks later and it was way more than we were willing to pay for the project. We told Mr. Zander as much and thought that was the end of it. Then he dropped off an initial layout of our property that he had started, on his own initiative without our direction, and said we owed him an additional $65 for the work. We emailed him and told him that we hadn't authorized the additional planning, just the initial estimate, and that we wouldn't pay the $65. After a few more email exchanges, we again thought that was the end. Now we've received a letter again requesting us to pay the $65. That's what finally made me write this review. It's not our responsibility if a contractor assumes we're going to use his services and starts unauthorized work. We paid $225 for one thing, an estimate of future work, nothing more.