September in Aroostook County smells like turned soil, and the roads around Woodland fill with harvest traffic heading toward Caribou. The King's Gardener Landscaping works the lawns between those fields — mowing, edging, trimming, mulch, and brush and leaf cleanup before the first hard freeze locks everything down. A northern yard gets one honest growing season and it is worth doing properly: even color, clean bed lines, nothing shaggy left standing when the cold arrives. By the time the light goes low and blue in late October the properties are put away for the year. Then the county settles in and waits for May.