Busy Bee Nursery, Landscaping, & Construction

Half a century on Route 68 in Jefferson, and what customers describe most isn't a plant — it's a plan. Busy Bee runs a garden center and a landscape construction crew out of the same yard at 57 Broad Street, and its Google reviews split cleanly along that line: shoppers loading a car with shrubs, and homeowners who handed over a problem property. BBB puts the start at 1977 and has accredited the business since 2010 at an A+; the company's own site says over 46 years. Google sits at 4.6 across 65 ratings, with 22 written reviews running from 2022 to 2026, and the same first names keep surfacing — Rick on design, Jen running the crew, Judy on the phone. A November 2025 customer credited "Rick's vision of what our property could be" after a five-day job. In September 2025 another described filling in an old playground site and stripping a steep slope of poison sumac and bittersweet. A 2024 reviewer listed yearly pruning plus a 300-foot driveway and a slate walkway; another that same autumn called the work a rescue of "three OUT OF CONTROL beds"; a 2023 customer had Rick and Scott plan a French drain and planting for a bare new-construction yard. Overgrown ground is plainly the job they get called for. The complaint worth reading sits in July 2025, and it's about materials rather than crews: a customer writing on behalf of their parents in Oakham said the loam delivered for a hydroseeded lawn had "TRASH BROKEN GLASS and paper in it," the seed didn't take, and a return visit with more loam and seed didn't fix it. Pin down where the loam comes from and what happens if hydroseed fails. Cutting the other way, a 2022 reviewer who wanted better finishing edited the rating upward after the crew came back and completed it. BBB has two Massachusetts Department of Public Safety licence numbers on file for the company — a construction supervisor number and a hoisting number — but those are BBB's own records, not something confirmed against the state registry. Massachusetts doesn't require home improvement contractor registration for landscaping-only work, and this outfit's listed scope runs wider than that: excavation and grading, sewer and water connections, masonry and retaining walls, plus a self-claimed general contractor profile on Procore covering Holden, Paxton, Rutland and Worcester. A sensible call for a design-led yard rebuild in the Holden–Worcester ring — beds, slopes, hardscape and drainage — particularly if you want the same firm supplying the plants. Before booking, get the loam and plant material specified in writing, and ask who is supervising on site.