Eliot landscaping company acquires rival, poised to dominate York County lawns
Courtesy / Piscataqua Landscaping & Tree Service
Justin Gamester is president of Piscataqua Landscaping & Tree Service, which has acquired the business of Jacquelyn Nooney. Both are shown here after the recent announcement of the deal.
An Eliot-based landscaping company that has competed with a neighboring firm for nearly four decades has now bought out its rival.
Piscataqua Landscaping & Tree Service has acquired Jacqueline Nooney Landscape Inc. for an undisclosed price, according to a news release. With about a dozen employees from Nooney joining Piscataqua, the company expects its workforce to total nearly 150, spokesman Jamie Storrs told Mainebiz Wednesday.
Jacquelyn Nooney is a Yale University art school graduate who moved to Maine in 1982, and founded the landscaping firm two years later. In a letter to clients, she said she is retiring and called Piscataqua “the one company in the region that can continue to provide the high-quality service [my clients] are accustomed to.”
Justin Gamester, president and CEO of Piscataqua, said in the release, “We have worked in the same neighborhoods and with some of the same clients as Jackie has over the years … It’s an honor for us to continue the fine work the JNL team has become known for over these past four decades and we plan to carry that commitment forward for many more years to come.”
Piscataqua was founded in 1979 by Booth Hemingway, who had earned degrees in horticulture and Spanish from the University of New Hampshire. He then started the business with a lawn mower, a pickup truck and a rented shed in Portsmouth, N.H.
Today Piscataqua works out of headquarters in Eliot, off Route 236, where Nooney’s business is also based less than a mile away. Both companies offer a range of lawn and garden care, landscape design and construction, snow removal and other services.
Piscataqua is the largest landscaping company in the Seacoast region, according to Storrs, based on a service territory that stretches from Kennebunkport to northern Massachusetts.
Such a large footprint appears to be unusual. Nationwide, there are over 513,000 landscaping businesses, employing 1.12 million people, according to a 2020 IBIS World industry report. That’s an average of around two employees per business.
The $99 billion industry has no major players with a market share of greater than 5%, the report noted.
The industry should bounce back from setbacks caused by the pandemic, according to IBIS World. “As economic activity rebounds, consumers and businesses will have renewed ability to pay for professional landscape maintenance,” the report said. “An aging population is expected to benefit the industry, too, as senior citizens seek landscaping professionals to maintain their yards.”
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