Loth & SonLawn Care & Landscaping
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Overbrook, across from Merion Station.

Overbrook pairs the large older houses of Overbrook Farms with rowhouse blocks, all just across City Avenue from Merion Station. Detached houses on established lots in Overbrook Farms, rowhouses and twins on the blocks around it.

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City of Philadelphia, zip 19151. Philadelphia license #063210. Across City Avenue from Merion Station in Lower Merion Township.

A Loth & Son crew member in a branded work shirt trimming a tall hedge above a stone wall along a residential street.

Working in Overbrook

Overbrook is in West Philadelphia, zip 19151, and it sits right against Lower Merion Township along City Avenue, across from Merion Station. Its best-known part is Overbrook Farms, a planned neighborhood laid out in the 1890s within walking distance of the Overbrook train station, with large detached houses and twins on generous lots with mature trees. Beyond it the neighborhood is mostly rowhouses and twins with small front and rear yards. Both kinds of property are old, and both have had a long time for walks, steps and plantings to settle.

In Overbrook Farms the problems are the ones every street of old houses has. Walls, steps and walks laid long ago on a thin base have heaved or sunk. Hedges and foundation shrubs have outgrown the spaces they were planted for. Shade from large trees has thinned the lawn, and roots run under everything, so grading and digging near them has to be done carefully. On the rowhouse blocks the issues are smaller in area and just as real: little room for water to soak in, rear yards pitched the wrong way, and no access but by hand.

On the detached houses we reset stone that has moved, rebuild steps and garden walls on proper footings, renovate overgrown beds, prune hedges and clear leaves under a heavy canopy each fall, with September overseeding for lawns that sit in shade most of the day. A rowhouse rear yard is usually a smaller list: break out the old concrete, lay a patio on a real base with the pitch running away from the house, put up a fence, plant the beds for the light they get.

A front lawn area newly seeded and covered in straw, with a sprinkler running and a mulched bed along the house.
Seeded and strawed in September, when cool nights and warm soil do the work.

What we do in Overbrook

Questions we get asked

  • The hedge in front of our Overbrook Farms house has gotten tall and bare at the bottom. Can it be saved?

    Often, yes. Many hedge shrubs, privet and boxwood among them, recover from a hard renewal cut taken in stages over two or three seasons, so the plant is never stripped all at once. The base thins because the top was sheared wider than the bottom and shaded it out. Trimming it narrower at the top than at the base lets light reach the lower branches again. Some old shrubs are past that point, and replacing them is the honest answer.

  • Can old stone walks and steps be reused instead of replaced?

    When the stone itself is sound, usually yes. The stone comes up, the failed base underneath is dug out and rebuilt to depth with compacted crushed stone, and the same stone goes back down with proper pitch. That is often the better result on an older house, because new stone rarely matches stone that has weathered for decades. If pieces are cracked through or a step has lost its footing, those parts get rebuilt.

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