Dennis Evans came of age in the landscaping industry. When he was young, he found that he enjoyed the outdoor ‘chores’ his parents gave him. Mowing, weeding, minor landscaping projects- it wasn’t a bad way to spend the day.

Soon, Dennis had transformed his parents’ yard into the best on the block, and neighbors began to notice. They came to him asking for help with their own lawns and gardens, and in 2001, Dennis started a landscaping company.

Quiet Village built its reputation from the ground up. It expanded slowly into more complicated projects. Hardscaping, garden installation, functional landscaping projects. Dennis’s little company became like those trees he planted in his parents’ yard. It just kept on growing. 

Since his company’s growth happened in such an organic way, Dennis found that many of his clients were asking for the same things. They knew Quiet Village had a reputation for landscape design and...

You could say that Marni Center is an animal person.

She moved from Deerfield, Illinois to Denver to study ecology and evolutionary biology. She's owned beautiful dogs and had so much fun training them that she completed The Animal Behavior College’s Dog Training program after she graduated. Since then, she’s made dog training her career, and she’s trained dogs all over the Denver area.

As Marni became more involved with the world of dog training, she began to find problems with some of the training methods her peers were using. That’s because many of them were using a method called Aversion Training.

Marni working on training with a client's dog

Aversion Training is a very common strategy for training dogs in the US and aims to expel unwanted behavior by utilizing things that are unpleasant to the dog such as shock collars, loud noises, and spray bottles. While this method often seems like it is working in...