Loth & SonLawn Care & Landscaping
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Wynnefield, City Avenue to the park.

Wynnefield runs from rowhouse front strips to larger singles under old trees, all between City Avenue and Fairmount Park. Rowhouses, twins and larger detached houses on streets with mature trees. The yard sizes vary a great deal, and the work follows the yard.

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City of Philadelphia, zip 19131. Philadelphia license #063210. Across City Avenue from Bala Cynwyd in Lower Merion Township.

Two crew members planting along a new gravel path, with flats of perennials and a wheelbarrow on the open ground.

Working in Wynnefield

Wynnefield is in West Philadelphia, zip 19131, between City Avenue on the north and Fairmount Park on the east. Much of it was built in the first half of the twentieth century, and the housing is mixed: brick rowhouses, twins, and some larger detached houses on deeper lots. Bala Cynwyd, in Lower Merion Township, is directly across City Avenue. What a yard looks like depends heavily on which of those three you live in, from a narrow front strip and a small rear yard to a lawn with established beds and a back slope.

Street trees and yard trees here are mature, which means shade on the lawn, roots under the walk, and a real leaf load in November. Front steps, walks and low walls built decades ago have often moved, because the base under them was thin and the frost has worked on it every winter since. On the smaller lots the issue is water with nowhere to go: a rear yard paved edge to edge, or pitched toward the house, sends rain at the back wall. Access is tight, so material comes in by hand.

On the rowhouse and twin blocks the common jobs are small and specific: taking up old concrete and laying a small patio with a proper base and pitch, a fence along the property line, and planting in front strips and rear beds that can take part shade. On the detached houses it looks more like the Main Line: resetting stone steps and walks, rebuilding a garden wall that leans out at the top, renovating overgrown beds, and pruning and leaf work.

A stand-on mower parked on a rear lawn cut in clean diagonal stripes, with a wood fence and trees behind.
The weekly cut. Stripes are what a sharp blade and a set route leave behind.

What we do in Wynnefield

Questions we get asked

  • My rear yard is all concrete. Can it be turned into a patio and a planting bed?

    Yes. The old slab is broken up and carried out, the ground underneath is checked for what it is actually made of, and the patio area gets a compacted stone base and a pitch that moves water away from the house. The rest becomes a bed, with the fill that was under the concrete swapped for real soil. On a small lot the drainage matters more than the stone, because there is so little ground for the water to soak into.

  • Which plants hold up in a shaded Wynnefield front strip?

    Under mature street trees, the plants that last are the ones that tolerate dry shade and root competition: hostas, ferns, sedges and low shrubs, set in amended soil and mulched at a modest depth. Sun-loving plants survive a season and then thin out. We plant for the light the strip gets in July, after the canopy has filled in.

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