CS Bailey Landscape

CS Bailey Landscape is a Harvard design-build shop run by a husband-and-wife pair of landscape architects, Chris and Sue, who say they've stayed hands-on in the trade for more than 25 years after training in the UK and US. The work is garden design and hardscape — patios, walkways, stone walls — alongside ongoing organic garden care, and the company's Houzz profile describes an in-house crew that includes masons and machine operators working alongside the two principals. The written record is short and split. In a 2018 review, a repeat client called CS Bailey one of the best landscape construction companies around, praising how easy Chris and his team were to work with and their ability to turn a dusty, brown yard lush and green across several projects. A very different account followed in a 2023 review: the customer called the hardscape work itself excellent, but wrote that numerous newly planted trees went in too deep and nearly all of them died — a problem the company reportedly never responded to, and a follow-up contractor later found a root-ball cage had been left on one of the trees during planting. Google shows a single 5-star rating, and the company's own Houzz listing shows one completed project publicly — so there isn't much beyond those two contrasting Houzz reviews to weigh the tree-planting complaint against. Worth asking about before hiring: how the company handles planting warranties and call-backs if new trees or shrubs don't establish, given the 2023 account. For hardscape and design work specifically, the kind of construction that seems to be the core of what they build, the 2018 review points to a company capable of a real transformation when the scope is building rather than planting.