Landscaping and Lawn Care in Marietta, GA

Cobb County's Oldest Yards

Marietta is the county seat and it has the housing stock to prove it. The streets running off Marietta Square and Glover Park, Kennesaw Avenue, Whitlock, Church and Cherokee, are lined with houses that predate every subdivision in this county. East Cobb, off Johnson Ferry, Roswell Road and Sandy Plains, is mostly 1960s and 1970s ranch on generous lots. West Cobb along Dallas Highway is newer and flatter.

That is three different jobs inside one city limit. A 1920s bungalow near the Square, a 1972 split-level in East Cobb and a 2004 house off Dallas Highway do not have the same soil, the same trees or the same problems, and we do not quote them like they do.

Old Houses Have Old Water Problems

The single most common call we get in Marietta is water where it should not be. A house built in 1955 was not built around a finished basement. Gutters are undersized or long gone, downspouts dump two feet from the wall, and seventy years of settling have tipped the first ten feet of grade back toward the foundation.

The order of operations is always the same. Get the roof water piped away to daylight. Put catch basins where the yard is actually holding. Cut a French drain across the uphill side if the neighbor's lot drains onto yours. Then regrade that first ten feet so it falls away from the house. That sequence solves more crawlspace complaints than anything else we do, and it costs less than the waterproofing quote most people get first.

Working in the Historic Districts

Marietta has local historic districts and a preservation commission that reviews exterior changes before they happen. Fences, walls, drives, steps and porch work near the Square are not a same-day decision, and a crew standing in the yard while paperwork moves is a bill nobody wants.

So we build the review into the schedule. You get the layout and the material list to submit, and the crew gets dated after it clears. Same discipline on retaining walls: past a certain height a wall needs a permit and an engineered detail in Cobb County, and you will hear that from us during the estimate, not after the block is on site.

Shade, Roots and Leaf Load

East Cobb's water oaks and the canopy over the older Marietta streets are the reason so many yards here have a bare patch that comes back every August. Turf under a mature hardwood is a fescue question, not a Bermuda question, and even fescue loses once surface roots take the top two inches.

When the roots have won we stop fighting them. Pine straw beds, shade plantings, groundcover, or a flagstone or paver sitting area right where the grass kept dying. It looks better and it costs less over ten years than resodding the same square every summer. The other Marietta constant is leaf load: under that canopy fall cleanup is a haul-off job, not a rake and a curb pile.