The owner of a local brewery in Orland has bought a well-established garden center in Blue Hill, with plans to grow his brewing operations and keep the garden shop running.
Spencer Janney opened the seasonal Naiad Country Brewery on Route 1 in Orland with Anne Daley in 2024 to sell his homemade beer. He’s now purchased Mainescape as owners Althea and Don Paine retire.
Along with growth for the brewery and a new chapter for the garden center, the sale marks the end of an era for Mainescape founder Don Paine and his wife, Althea, after decades running the business in the community and completing landscaping projects for three generations of peninsula residents.
“It’s important to me and my wife that that tradition stays alive,” Don Paine said of the shop on Monday.
As a landscape architecture student at Syracuse University, he spent summers around Blue Hill working for a retired landscaper who taught him the trade and encouraged him to go into business there after graduating in 1977.
Paine bought an old farmhouse on South Street in 1981 and started selling plants the following spring with a sign by the road, aiming to provide public visibility for his growing landscape construction operation.
Now a commercial corridor next to downtown, South Street was almost totally undeveloped at the time – people would ask him what he was doing “out there,” Paine remembered as one of the community changes he’s seen through almost 50 years. The northern end of the street is now lined by a Hannaford, Walgreens, food co-op, two food chains and numerous other businesses.
Over the decades, he grew the garden center, owned and operated another in Bar Harbor, got married, opened an organic farmstand to replace the only one in the area at the time and added a large glass greenhouse that’s hosted numerous community events. Althea Paine has been a familiar face to customers while Don Paine focused on landscape construction, which he plans to continue for a few longtime clients.
“It was a passionate profession,” he said. “I was passionate about it. I was excited about it.”
Preparing for retirement, the couple wanted to keep Mainescape in place as an essential part of their community, Don Paine said. They chose Janney’s offer for that reason.
He plans to carry on the garden center and add new elements, according to Paine. With six acres on the property, there’s room to grow, which was a goal of Paine’s as well.
Janney’s own business grew substantially last year, straining production capacity and space at the Orland property, according to a Facebook post he wrote announcing the sale. He couldn’t be reached for comment Monday.
One of his main goals with the brewery is to re-center beer as an agricultural product, he wrote. That led him to choose the rural setting of the brewery and was why he saw buying Mainescape as in line with its growth.
Wary of expanding, he wanted to do it in a “uniquely Naiad way,” Janney said.
“The center of my heart is in creating community spaces for the real people who we engage with in our small communities, especially in this area of Maine,” he wrote. “When I realized that it was time for Naiad to grow and saw that Mainescape was on the market, the gears started turning and I felt more and more like there was a singular opportunity for a beautiful synergy here.”
He plans to add larger production equipment to a barn on the lower corner of the property, but little else will change for now. In the future, he’ll keep working toward a “deeper integration” to make the property more accessible and multifaceted, he said.
The production space should also allow Janney to expand days of operation at the Orland brewery and get closer to canning and bottling beer for sale.
Most of Mainescape’s employees will stay on, Paine said; some have worked there for decades. The couple will also miss their customers, who they said on Facebook were their favorite part of running Mainescape and have often become good friends.
“I feel humbled that I can hand over the reins for a new owner,” Paine said.
