About Mark Taylor & Southbound Landscape Co.

---

The man behind the mower

Mark Taylor — Yazoo City, MS to the Memphis metro

Mark Taylor grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, a small Delta town where the summers are long, the grass grows fast, and if you wanted spending money you figured out how to earn it. Mark figured it out early. His first real job was mowing yards in the neighborhood — not with a truck and a trailer, but on his bicycle, towing the mower behind him down the street. Ten dollars a yard. He showed up, he did the work, and he came back the next week.

That is not a bad summary of Southbound Landscape Co., honestly.

Mark has spent most of his adult life in the Memphis metro, and DeSoto County has been home for years. He knows this side of the state line the way you only can when you actually live here — the clay soil in Olive Branch that turns to concrete in August, the wooded lots in Germantown that drop leaves in three waves, the tight HOA specs in Collierville where the edging on the curb line is not optional. He drives through these subdivisions every day, not just on job days.

What brought him back to landscaping after years away was the same thing that got him on that bike in Yazoo City: a genuine love of being outside, working with his hands, and making something look right when it did not before. There is a satisfaction in a clean stripe across a Bermuda lawn at seven in the morning that is hard to explain to someone who has not felt it. Mark has felt it since he was a kid.

He also, it must be said, likes big trucks and big equipment. The zero-turn that fits on the trailer now is a long way from what he towed behind a bicycle in Yazoo City — and he is not complaining about that upgrade one bit.

Why he started the company

Southbound was established in 2024 out of a straightforward frustration that Mark kept running into as a homeowner himself: getting a reliable lawn service in this market is harder than it should be. You call four numbers. Two never call back. One sends a salesperson who will not name a price. The fourth shows up twice and disappears in July.

He built the company around fixing exactly that. The owner is on every residential job — not dispatching from an office, not handing off to a rotating crew. When you call 662-883-5940, you get Mark. When the truck pulls up on Tuesday, that is Mark. The scope of every visit is defined and consistent, the rate is quoted before the first cut, and if rain pushes the schedule you get a text — because Mark knows what it is like to come home and wonder why the yard looks the same as last week.

---

Service area

Where we work

Home base is DeSoto County — Southaven, Olive Branch, Hernando and Horn Lake are the daily route. Southaven is the third-largest city in Mississippi and Olive Branch is the fastest-growing suburb in the county, which means an enormous number of quarter- and half-acre subdivision lots within a few minutes of each other. That density is what lets us hold rates where they are.

From there we run east to Holly Springs and north across the line into Shelby County: Collierville, Germantown, Bartlett, Cordova, Arlington, Lakeland and East Memphis. Roughly a 50-kilometre radius. If you are outside it, call anyway — sometimes we already have a Thursday truck near you.

How we actually mow

The technical side matters more than most people are told. Mississippi State Extension’s rule of thumb is that you never remove more than one-third of the leaf blade in a single mow, and that letting turf get overgrown before cutting stresses the plant. That is why we push weekly service through peak summer on Bermuda lawns rather than stretching everyone to every-other-week and scalping the yard back into shape.

We cut Bermuda at 0.5–1.5 inches, zoysia at 1–2 inches, centipede at 1.5–2 inches and fescue around 3 inches, per MSU Extension’s published height targets. Blades get sharpened on a schedule, because a dull blade tears the leaf tip and the whole lawn reads brown from the porch a day later.

The rest of the year

Mowing pays the bills from April to November, but the calendar here has four distinct jobs in it. Late winter is cleanup and bed reset, and by mid-March we are watching soil temperature for pre-emergent timing. April brings mulch. May through midsummer is when core aeration actually helps warm-season turf in our clay. November and December is leaves, over and over.

We would rather be the one company that handles all of it on your property than the one that shows up for eight months and hands you off.