Planting and garden beds in North Yarmouth, Maine.
North Yarmouth has gardening in its bones. The 2018 Comprehensive Plan describes a town that was a quiet farming community through the nineteenth century, and a lot of houses built since the 1990s now sit on former hay fields and pasture. That history shows up in the beds: open, sunny ground with decent silt loam on one property, and thin stony soil at the edge of the woods on the next.
We install foundation plantings, perennial beds and mulch, and we plan each bed around the soil and exposure that is actually there.
Old hayfields and acid silt
The NRCS description for Lamoine silt loam, one of the most common soils around Walnut Hill, uses an abandoned hayfield as its typical profile. Lamoine and the related Scantic series are fine-textured and slow to drain, so beds on those soils are raised slightly, amended with compost worked into the top several inches, and edged so water does not pool against the foundation. Suffield soils on the side slopes are strongly acid near the surface, which favors plants that tolerate low pH or calls for lime based on a soil test.
On the sandy Windsor soils mapped in parts of town the problem reverses: water leaves too fast. Those beds get more organic matter and plants that handle dry spells, and mulch does more of the work of holding moisture.
Plant choice in zone 6a with deer in the yard
The 2023 USDA hardiness map places the town in zone 6a. The Comprehensive Plan also identifies ten candidate deer wintering areas, which means evergreen foundation shrubs that deer favor can be browsed hard by February. We steer foundation plantings toward species deer usually leave alone and keep the most palatable ones close to the house or out of the plan.
The Maine Forest Service lists oak, apple, cherry, shadbush, beach plum and rugosa rose among browntail moth host plants. On properties where that pest has been an issue, we avoid adding more host shrubs right beside patios and doors. Beds get a two to three inch mulch layer kept off stems and trunks.
Along the woodland edge, native shrubs such as highbush blueberry, winterberry and viburnums bridge the gap between a cultivated bed and the forest that covers most of town, and they tolerate the acid soils that are common here.
Plantings · Mulch · Garden Design
How we handle planting & garden beds
We build planting beds that look better every year — hardy perennials and shrubs matched to your site, finished with clean-edged mulch and stone accents. From single foundation beds to full hillside plantings.
See the full planting & garden beds service page or everything we do in North Yarmouth, Maine.
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Planting & Garden Beds in North Yarmouth? Let's talk.
Tell us about your property and we will walk it with you — free estimates, straight answers, stonework guaranteed to hold its lines.
Mon–Sat 7:00am – 5:00pm · Based in Cumberland, Maine