Landscaping in Gorham, Maine.

With a third of its homes built since 2000 and a median of 1988, most Gorham houses were landscaped by a builder on a deadline: a thin layer of loam over fill, a few foundation shrubs and a lawn seeded wherever the grading ended. Fifteen or twenty years on, those lawns are thin and compacted, the shrubs have outgrown the windows and the back yard still has no patio.

That is the work that changes a Gorham property most: a paver or flagstone patio built on a properly excavated and compacted base, foundation beds replanted to scale, and a lawn rebuilt with the four to six inches of topsoil UMaine Extension recommends rather than whatever was left after construction.

The 2023 USDA map puts Gorham in zone 5b, a half-zone colder than the coast, so plants in foundation beds should be hardy to that zone. UMaine Extension recommends a Kentucky bluegrass and fine fescue mix for most lawns, with more fescue where soil is dry or shaded, seeded between mid-August and mid-September.

The Maine Forest Service lists Gorham in its quarantines for emerald ash borer, hemlock woolly adelgid, spongy moth and white pine blister rust. Ash trees near the house and hemlocks on wooded lots are worth an arborist's look before they become a removal problem.