Hodgen Landscaping Co. Inc.

About Hodgen Landscaping Co. Inc.

There is a week in Belchertown when the frost finally lets go of the hill country above the Quabbin, the ground softens underfoot, and Hodgen Landscaping Co. Inc. trades plow blades for mower decks in the same breath. Their year runs the whole arc of a western Massachusetts season — landscape design and lawn construction, grounds maintenance, mowing and trimming, lawn fertilization, mulch and stone garden prepping, tree and shrub planting, pruning and feeding, paver patio and wall construction, light excavating and dump trucking, spring and fall cleanup — and then snow removal when the valley goes pale again. It is work that shows: a patio set true against a slope of old stone-wall country, a bed edged so cleanly the mulch line reads like a drawn stroke, a lawn raised out of bare soil that comes up thick enough to carry its own summer. And in deep winter, a drive opened before the first light reaches the town common, the whole property still asleep and the way out already clear.