Leah was born and raised in Colorado Springs and grew up enjoying all the beauty that Colorado has to offer: camping, hiking, gardening, and watching Air Force football games from the stands with her loving parents and older brother. Leah’s green thumb comes from her mom, Shelley, who instilled an appreciation for flowers and houseplants in her at an early age. Leah graduated from Manitou Spring High School in 2011 and went on to study at Colorado Mesa University, where she graduated with cum laude honors in 2015. Leah and Christopher met in 2016 and moved to Maryland in 2017 in order for Chris to further his career in horticulture. Leah got a job at the University of Delaware where she was able to complete a master’s degree in Business while working full-time and traveling all over Latin America for her job. Leah and Chris moved back to Colorado in September 2021 to start Win Gardens Greenhouse as a married couple.

Christopher is the 4th youngest child of a large family of 23 children. Born in Doylestown, PA, Christopher always felt that Colorado was home given that his family moved to the state in 1996 when he was only 3 years old. Christopher is a 3rd generation grower with some of his earliest memories tracing back to being in his parent’s greenhouse in eastern Colorado. Instead of attending university, Christopher worked at his older brother Aaron’s greenhouse, Dutch Heritage Gardens, for a handful of years before moving to Maryland to assist another brother, Jake, in starting his business SunMed Growers. Christopher has done every job imaginable in a greenhouse, from watering to applying pesticides to managing a large group of people and helping to create standard operating procedures and everything in between. After Christopher and Leah got married in 2021, it was time to start their own venture and together they created Win Gardens Greenhouse.

Arie’s parents Aart and Cora Van Wingerden immigrated from Holland to the US on May 10, 1948. Born in New Jersey, Arie spent his adolescence in the greenhouse world alongside his 11 brothers and 4 sisters, all of whom either started their own business in the industry or married into another horticulture family. Today there are well over 30 different agricultural ventures from this lineage. Arie is a tried and true entrepreneur and inventor who has started a range of successful business ventures over the last 40 years, including greenhouses in Pennsylvania and Colorado. The business he’s best known for, Cherry Creek Systems, provides high-quality automated greenhouse irrigation systems to growers worldwide.