Landscaping in Yarmouth, Maine.

Yarmouth's 2024 Comprehensive Plan inventory maps the town's steep ground in the ravines west of I-295, around Pratt's Brook and along both banks of the Royal and Cousins rivers. It also rates much of the town's coastal bluff shoreline — mostly on the islands and along Whites Cove — as unstable. On lots like that, a retaining wall is a structure with drainage behind it, not a pile of stone, and clearing vegetation off a slope can do more harm than good.

The same plan counts 34 soil types in town and roughly 3,900 acres of prime or statewide-important farmland soil. In practice, a lawn in the village can sit on very different ground from one in the rural north end, which is why a soil test comes before any lime or seed.

Dutch elm disease took most of the village's elm canopy beginning in 1958, and the town's plan says fewer than ten legacy elms remain. Today the plan names emerald ash borer as actively attacking ash, and lists browntail moth, winter moth and hemlock woolly adelgid among the rising threats to the town's trees. Pruning and removal decisions on mature trees here deserve an arborist's eye, and our team includes a licensed arborist.