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Austeville owns and manages rental apartment buildings and towers throughout Metro Vancouver.
Team Austeville
Meet Daniel Koveshnikov, Austeville’s Service Operations Manager
Austeville Properties takes pride in creating vibrant and welcoming spaces—inside and out. Where the landscaping is concerned, this is in great part thanks to the work of Service Operations Manager Daniel Koveshnikov and his talented team of landscapers.
Daniel credits his Ukrainian grandparents with sowing the seeds of his passion for plants. On their small Eastern European farm, “they grew as many vegetables as they could, because in Ukraine you couldn’t always trust there would be food in the stores.”
Daniel’s parents immigrated to the US from Ukraine in the 1990s, after his mom earned a scholarship to study library science at Louisiana State University. His father was accepted into the engineering physics program at the same school. Once they graduated, the senior Koveshnikovs left the US and moved to the Lower Mainland with their two young sons.
The family settled in Richmond, BC. After high school Daniel thought he might follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue engineering, but a couple of years into his UBC degree he realized he might be better suited to work in another field. During his subsequent post-secondary hiatus, he landed a position as a landscaper with Richmond-based Isidore Landscapes, where he realized that other field might be an actual field—complete with flowers and foliage. Daniel not only loved learning about plants, but he also had a knack for growing things.
So he went back to UBC, this time enrolling in the Horticulture Training Program at the university’s botanical garden. This was in 2020, when most of the world was working or studying from their couch, but Daniel and his cohort of 20 budding horticulturalists were fortunate to be able to attend the trade school in-person, outdoors—getting close and personal with the plants while keeping a healthy six-foot distance from one another.
Fast forward four years and not only has Daniel earned his Red Seal in Landscape Horticulture, but he’s leading Austeville Properties’ team of seven, full-time landscapers. He’s also responsible for planning and tending the gardens for 25 of the company’s Lower Mainland residential and commercial properties—an impressive trajectory for the 26-year-old.
When Daniel was first hired by Austeville as a horticulture technician just over three years ago, the bulk of the family-run company’s landscaping work was contracted to outside providers. Now a large portion of the gardening is the responsibility of Daniel’s crew.
“Austeville realized that by bringing the landscaping in-house, the gardens would get more care and attention,” says Daniel. “They want the best, and they give me a lot of autonomy to create and maintain beautiful spaces. In the back of my mind I’m always thinking about how we can improve things, like which plants can we add that will help attract birds and beneficial insects.”
At the moment, Daniel is very interested in perennial native and pollinator species. His current favourite is yarrow, a resilient flower that also has medicinal properties.
He used yarrow and a plethora of other wildflowers to transform the gardens at a couple of Austeville’s Burnaby properties, where, armed with a combination of cardboard, soil and seeds, Daniel and his crew converted a mess of invasive plants, like blackberries, into beautiful wildflower meadows.
And that’s only the beginning.
“There’s no shortage of projects at Austeville,” says Daniel, adding that topping the list for this year is a major overhaul and cleanup of the grounds of one of the large residential complexes. “We’re clearing out overgrown shrubs and trees and replacing the empty spots with colourful plants.”
Daniel’s also a big fan of Austeville’s West Vancouver Shorewood Manor site, where tenants (many of whom are retired) oversee their own plots at the neighbouring seaside Navvy Jack Gardens; and of Art on 6th, whose tenants benefit from the bounty of the shared 7th Floor Terrace—think blueberries, rosemary and garlic.
For Austeville tenants who want to grow a garden on their balcony, Daniel says it’s relatively easy to cultivate gorgeous flowers and vegetables in containers as long as you select plants that work with the light conditions of your particular suite.
When he’s not on site at one of Austeville’s properties, Daniel can still be found in the vicinity of plants of one type or another. As a previous committee member with The David Suzuki Foundation’s Butterflies in My Backyard project and the proud proprietor of a community garden plot that he shares with his partner, Daniel spends much of his leisure time playing in the dirt and growing beautiful and delicious crops. But when asked if his community garden plot is the best of the bunch, he humbly replies, “It’s subjective. Everyone has the best one.”