Philadelphia, across City Avenue.

For a long stretch, City Avenue is the boundary between Lower Merion Township and Philadelphia, and the neighborhoods on either side sit only a few blocks apart. So landscaping in Philadelphia, for us, starts with the neighborhoods that touch the township: Wynnefield and Overbrook directly across City Avenue, East Falls and Roxborough and Manayunk along the Schuylkill, and Chestnut Hill in the northwest corner of the city. We would rather say that plainly than claim the whole city. A crew working in Merion Station on Monday can be in Overbrook on Tuesday. The far side of the city is a different week.

Inside the city line the work splits two ways. Rowhouse and twin yards are small and still take planning. A rear yard that is mostly old concrete has to come up by hand and leave through the house or down a shared rear driveway. A small patio still needs the same excavation, base and pitch as a large one, and on a tight lot the water has nowhere to go but toward the house or the neighbor.

Further northwest the houses get bigger and the ground gets steeper. Chestnut Hill, East Falls and Roxborough have many detached stone houses, a good number built of Wissahickon schist, on lots that fall toward the Wissahickon Creek or the Schuylkill. That means retaining walls, stone steps, grading that has to move water off a hillside, and beds under a mature canopy. Philadelphia runs its own permitting through the Department of Licenses and Inspections, separate from the township across City Avenue, so what a job needs is checked against the city before it is written into an estimate.