Conolly Gardens and Landscape Design, Inc.

Conolly Gardens is a mother-and-son shop working out of Sandwich, and the jobs people describe hiring them for are the slow horticultural ones: design a garden, plant it, then keep coming back to tend it. The company says Barbara Conolly started it in 2003 as Gardens by Barbara Conolly in Rochester, New York, moved it to Cape Cod in 2014, and brought her son Ben in at the end of 2015 — she is president, he runs operations. Its stated service area runs from Falmouth and Mashpee up the Cape to Chatham and Harwich, and across the canal to Plymouth. The most useful account is also the newest. In a March 2026 review, out-of-state owners of an East Falmouth vacation home wrote that they needed a team that could handle permitting and deal directly with the town; Conolly helped them address Conservation Commission requirements to close out a building permit, then did extensive tree work and pruning and put more than 150 plants in the backyard. Earlier praise runs the same direction with less detail — a 2023 reviewer described Barbara and her crew as responsive and kind even when the news about a garden was bad. On Google the company sits at 4.6 across 11 ratings. Weigh that against a one-star account from August 2024. That customer said the subcontractors did well but the project leadership did not: dead and dying trees, bushes and plants after installation, stepping stones spaced so far apart they pulled them out, and a lawn seeded in mid-June over crabgrass that left bare soil through the summer. The two sides jointly agreed to exit the contract. It is the only substantive complaint anyone has written, and the two reviews posted since are both five stars. Horticultural training is the firm's calling card, and it is claimed rather than independently confirmed here. Houzz lists a Certified Arborist credential from the International Society of Arboriculture and a Massachusetts Certified Landscape Professional designation, and the company names those plus a Massachusetts Certified Horticulturist and Accredited Organic Land Care Professional on its staff. Six reviews since 2021 is a thin written history for a firm this old, so treat the rating as provisional. If you want a garden designed, planted and then maintained — and especially if a permit or a Conservation Commission filing is in the way — they are a reasonable call. Get the installation plan in writing, including when the lawn gets seeded and what happens if plantings fail.