Wicomico County, MD Tree Protection: Parkway Planting (2026)

The county's landscaping chapter sets a specific street-tree planting rate for its planned development districts. Under § 225-139H, an applicant proposing a Planned Village Conservation District (PVCD) must submit a comprehensive landscape master plan to the Planning Commission identifying the location and size of existing vegetation to be retained and new vegetation proposed, the typical planting materials, the phasing of landscape installation, and planting methods; within that plan, street trees in residential districts must be provided at a rate of one tree for every 40 feet of street frontage. Section 225-139I imposes the identical landscape-master-plan and one-tree-per-40-feet requirement on a planned unit development (PUD), so the standard travels with whichever planned-development approval the project uses.

This street-tree rate sits inside the broader Part 11 landscaping standards (§§ 225-139 through 225-145), which separately fix planting widths for commercial, industrial and other districts and set acceptable tree and shrub species and calipers in § 225-142. Because the 40-foot standard is tied to PVCD and PUD approvals rather than every residential subdivision countywide, it applies at the site-plan review stage: the Planning Commission reviews the master landscape plan for compliance before final approval, and under § 225-141E an applicant may combine street-tree plantings with mitigation required under the county's Forest Conservation Act, the Chesapeake Bay Critical Area Program, or the state's Non-Tidal Wetlands Act rather than planting duplicative trees.