Merrifield Garden & Design

Homeowners who hire Merrifield Garden & Design tend to remember a person, not a company. Alex, Katie J, Julian, Nils, Alyssa — reviewers name the designer and the crew who actually showed up, which is a rare habit in landscaping reviews and says something about how the jobs run. The Wayland company says Katie Merrifield started it in 2004 as a small garden maintenance and planting business, and that it has been at this for 22 years. It works MetroWest towns from Newton and Wellesley out to Concord, Sudbury and Marlborough, and describes itself as plant-first: garden design, installation, and the ongoing fine-garden maintenance that keeps a planting alive after the trucks leave. What customers describe lines up with that. In a 2023 review, a homeowner walked through a two-year rebuild of a front and back yard that had gone overplanted and overgrown, turned into something lower-maintenance and coherent. Another that summer described a crew tearing out ground-cover roses and poison ivy, then getting twenty plants and shrubs into the ground in a single day. A 2022 customer restoring a Japanese garden damaged during exterior house work started, at the designer's instruction, with a soil test. Plant quality surfaces again and again — reviewers in 2022 and 2023 singled out healthy, carefully sourced shrubs and trees — alongside on-time arrivals and a site left clean. A 2024 review described years of spring and fall clean-ups plus one-off planting projects, and a LinkedIn recommendation posted in 2026 credits Katie with plantings she has maintained and improved over the years. Google puts them at 4.7 across 14 ratings. The one low mark has nothing to do with landscaping: a 2021 one-star review complained that a company truck pulled out in front of the reviewer's car. Worth knowing, but it is a driving complaint, not a workmanship one. Houzz shows a 5.0 — off a single review, and that review dates to 2015, so read the number for what it is. Two things to raise on the call. The horticultural credentials on the Houzz profile — Accredited Organic Land Care Professional, Massachusetts Certified Horticulturalist, Certified Arborist, Massachusetts Certified Landscape Professional — are supplied by the business to that directory, so ask which staff member currently holds which. And Massachusetts does not require home improvement contractor registration for landscaping-only work, so there is no state licence here to check either way. If you want a garden designed by someone who will have opinions about plant choices and then come back seasonally to keep them alive, this is that kind of shop. Pin down who your designer will be, and what the maintenance arrangement looks like once the install is done.