Tree & Shrub Planting
Tree and shrub planting across Maryland's Eastern Shore. Privacy screens, foundation beds, and specimen trees selected for salt, wet ground, and sika deer pressure. Fall is the planting window here. Marshall Property Management.
Fall is when things planted here actually take.
Spring planting is what most people do and late summer into fall is what works better on the Shore. Soil is still warm enough to push root growth, air temperature has come off the summer peak, rainfall is more reliable, and the plant gets a full cool season to establish before it ever has to face a Delmarva July.
A tree planted in October has had eight months in the ground by the time real heat arrives. The same tree planted in May has had six weeks.
Privacy Screens
Foundation Beds
Specimen & Shade Trees
Hedging
Native & Buffer Planting
Replacement Planting
What kills plantings on the Eastern Shore.
Bagworms on arborvitae and Leyland cypress. The single most common failure in privacy screens here. Bagworms are easy to miss until the bags are obvious, and by then the defoliation on an evergreen is often permanent. Evergreens do not releaf the way a deciduous tree does. Screens should be checked for bags every year, and treatment timed to when the larvae are small and feeding. See insect control.
Salt. Winter salt spray off the water burns the windward side of evergreens while they are dormant. On an exposed lot, a screen of the wrong species turns brown on one face and stays that way.
Wet feet. Planting a species that wants drainage into ground that holds water for weeks in spring is a slow failure that looks like disease. Most of the time it is not disease.
Sika deer. Through Dorchester and the lower Shore, sika browse pressure is real and different from whitetail. A plant list that survives on the mainland is not automatically a plant list that survives here.
Planting depth. More young trees die from being planted too deep than from anything on this list. The root flare goes at grade. It is the least glamorous detail on the page and the one that decides whether the tree is alive in five years.
How we plant.
The hole is dug wide rather than deep, roughly two to three times the width of the root ball, with the sides broken up so roots can move out of it. The root flare sits at or slightly above finished grade. Burlap, wire, and any synthetic twine come off the top of the ball rather than staying buried. Backfill is the native soil the plant has to live in, not a pocket of imported compost that roots will refuse to leave.
Mulch goes down in a ring, two to three inches deep, pulled back off the trunk. The volcano of mulch piled against the bark that you see all over the region holds moisture against the trunk and invites rot and voles.
Staking only where the site actually requires it, and removed after the first season. A tree that is never allowed to move never builds the trunk taper that lets it stand on its own.
New plantings need water on a schedule for the first two seasons, which is more than most people expect and the most common reason a good installation still fails. We run that as a service where clients want it. See tree and plant watering.
Homes & Yards
Exposed Lots
Screening & Frontage
Getting a number.
Planting is priced by what goes in the ground and what it takes to get it there. Plant size, quantity, access for equipment, soil condition, and whether the bed has to be built before anything can be planted are what move the cost. A screen of twenty five-foot evergreens down a flat open property line and the same twenty plants carried through a gate by hand are different jobs.
We walk it, tell you what we would plant and why, and price it. If the honest answer is that the site needs drainage work before it needs plants, we will tell you that instead.
See also: Landscape Design · Landscaping · Tree & Plant Watering · Insect Control · Environmental Services · Forestry