Welcome to the web site of Jungle Taming, LLC! My name is Bill Kunze. That’s me over there to the right, waving my hat!..

Greetings! I’d like to take a moment to tell you about us and our site.

And…if you would wish to jump  right into talking about your gardening needs, you can contact by phone at 803-463-2655. Or you can click on “Contact Us” above, fill out the form and send it along.

Our site has both helpful information about our business and about gardening here in the Midlands of South Carolina – just follow the navigation above.

See our latest Presentation Here!

OK, now about us...

At Jungle Tamers we take unattractive grounds and make them beautiful again. This involves imagination, vision, and a manicuring effort which is far beyond what it would take to simply maintain grounds.

No greater joy exists for us than taking on the challenge of changing what looks impossibly ugly and making it beautiful again. That’s why we call our business “Jungle Taming.”

Most of the people in the lawn maintenance business  are geared up for speed (and multiple jobs per day) and cannot expend the time and effort required to tackle “jungle” projects. After all, to do this job properly, one must frequently get down on hands and knees and crawl around under large shrubs and trees. How else can a person remove vines and saplings from under a beautiful old azalea or camellia? Most lawn maintenance crews are not trained in horticulture and are not skilled in the care of shrubs and perennials and trees.

Pruning is a lost art.  It’s easy to just sheer the outside of a bush, which is usually not what a shrub needs. If a shrub hasn’t been cleaned out in years someone has to crawl into the shrub, remove dead limbs, take out  renegade branches, and open up the plant so that more light can get through to encourage new growth. Willingness to do these things is what we call loving your shrubs, trees, and beds.

To prepare myself for my work, I earned a Landscape Management Certificate from Midlands Tech in Columbia, S.C. This involved 228 hrs of study on the subject a caring for bushes, trees, beds and lawns.

Prior to that, I helped with my son in his lawn maintenance business. That’s where I became interested in the subjects of bushes, trees and beds.  Almost invariably his lawn customers would ask us to also trim the trees, remove the weeds, mulch the beds, prune the shrubs and remove the ivy from the fence lines. We got so many requests to do so and the customers were so satisfied with the way we did our work that they kept referring us on to others. Soon, I realized that if we were willing to do the things others wouldn’t, like getting down on our hands and knees to address the bushes, trees and beds that we’d have a good business.

The people I serve also realize that I care about them. After all I satisfied my insurance customers for the 32 preceding years and cared so much about them that many still call me. That’s because I love the people I serve, and I put their interest ahead of mine. I still do that today in my beautification business and I have lots of satisfied customers to prove it. The only reason I switched to this beautification business was that it gave me more joy and it gave my customers more joy as well.

Most of our customers have lost the capacity to work on their landscape due to death, disability, old age, divorce, lack of: time, tools, interest. Some have received a code violation letter from a municipality. Many customers have purchased homes in an older residential neighborhood, & they want me to get their overgrown backyard into a maintainable state by removing invasive vines (Wisteria, Smilax, Honeysuckle, English Ivy, Poison Ivy, Virginia Creeper, Kudzu, Asiatic Jasmine, etc.). I am licensed to apply herbicide & use it only when it is necessary to prevent regrowth of invasive vines. I also prune shrubbery. You can save money if you want to dispose of the debris I cut and/or participate in a workday (M-F) beatification effort. We do not mow grass, apply chemicals to deal with lawn weeds, rake leaves or remove trees, but often we can recommend others who do that kind of work.

I serve in the Columbia, S.C. area, but most often you’ll find me in the Forest Acres and  Shandon areas of the city making the shrubs, trees and beds beautiful again.