Gagnon Landscape Contracting

Gagnon is a family firm in the literal sense: Dan Gagnon runs it as CEO, Emily is CFO and the one customers say sourced their specific crabapple and dogwood varieties, Andrew heads maintenance and Stephen heads residential construction. Customers write about Dan and Emily by name more than they write about crews, which tells you what kind of company this is — the principals stay on the job. The work runs from weekly mowing at the low end to design-build at the high end. Recent customers describe an underground drain with a popup emitter installed to carry gutter water away from a house, and a full yard clear-out on a property that had gone years without one. In a December 2025 review a couple described a long, four-foot New England fieldstone wall built across the front of their property alongside two new flowering trees. A 2024 customer wrote about a new lawn, plantings, hardscape and routine mowings from the same team; another that year had a patio built and kept them on for bi-weekly maintenance. The company also does pool construction, excavation and drainage, and — by its own account — residential construction including decking, permitting and general contracting. Snow is part of it too. In a February 2026 review a customer wrote that they slipped into a snow drift and were yelling for help when the plow arrived, and the driver jumped out and helped them up before finishing the driveway. Two things to weigh. First, the company's site says it has been doing this work "for nearly two decades," while the same site's own history says two Reading friends started mowing lawns in 2010 as teenagers and the business became Gagnon Landscape Contracting in 2016; Angi and HomeAdvisor both list nine years of experience, and the site elsewhere says ten. The craftsmanship is separate from the arithmetic, but the founding date is worth asking about directly. Second, a Consumers' Checkbook subscriber in Reading, in a comment on file from 2024, judged them "OK for removing leaves in the fall but not for growing grass or growing or arranging flowers beds or providing quality dirt" — a specific reservation about the horticultural side, which is precisely what a design-build planting firm sells. The written record is genuinely positive but shallow in one respect: it is 19 reviews, all of them on Google and all from 2024 onward. Their Angi and HomeAdvisor pages carry none at all. If you are hiring them for a large build, ask for references on planting and soil work specifically, get the scope of any construction or permitting in writing, and confirm what registration covers it.