Changing lives, changing landscapes: rite of passage inspires yard makeover

For the first 12 years they lived in their home on McCallum Street in Mt. Airy, Beth Rosenbaum and Noel Eisenstat didn’t touch their landscaping, except to install a fence with a gate around the front yard. And this was a practical decision, not an aesthetic one. The Eisenstats had one-year-old twins, Aaron and Ben, who knew how to open their front door.

“The focus of our yard for the first 12 years was as a play space,” explains Rosenbaum. “We wanted a safe place for kids to play, to have birthday parties. We didn’t care about the lawn because we knew it was going to get trampled. The kiddie pool was on the grass in the summer. Even after the boys outgrew it as a play space, we had no motivation to do anything about [the yard].”

Their motivation came when they started planning their sons’ B’Nei Mitzvah (plural of Bar Mitzvah, a boy’s ceremonial entrance into Jewish adulthood). They painted the house. They replaced the front porch and rebuilt the back deck. And they called Brad Baker, owner of Baker Creative Inc. in Wyncote and a Pennsylvania Certified Horticulturist, to help them update the landscape – not only for their sons’ big day, but also for the future.

Significant family events, particularly those symbolizing a new stage in a family’s life (a Bar Mitzvah, graduation or wedding), are often the impetus for major landscape renovations. Even if they don’t hold the main celebrations at home, families entertain more around these events, perhaps hosting pre-event dinners or post-celebration brunches, and they want their homes to shine. And lifestyle changes often come with these lifecycle events. Families want landscapes that serve their evolving needs.

Although most of the celebrations surrounding the B’Nei Mitzvah took place elsewhere, the Eisenstats hosted a large Shabbat dinner (the traditional Friday night dinner that begins the Jewish Sabbath) for family and out-of-town guests.

“The focus of the B’Nei Mitzvah was being with family,” says Rosenbaum. “A lot of our family came in from out of town. It was important to us to welcome them and entertain them in our home.”

But the Eisenstats wanted more than just a nice looking yard for that one weekend. They asked Baker to create outdoor living spaces more suited to their family’s needs now that the boys were teenagers.

“The landscape was not designed to be a redo just for the event. This was for our house. For a livable landscape plan,” stresses Rosenbaum.

Landscaping for the present and the future.

Baker, a fit, affable man who confesses he doesn’t like being indoors for too long, sees himself as a consultant, combining his clients’ ideas and desires with his vision and experience to create landscaping that meets both his clients’ present needs and their future plans. Whether planning for an event like the Eisenstats’ B’Nei Mitzvah or designing projects in the regular course of caring for a client’s landscaping, Baker begins by meeting with his clients and walking around the property. He listens to the clients’ ideas, questions and concerns both for the upcoming event, if there is one, and for the landscape as a whole. He also asks the clients to think about their goals for their home and property.

With this information and his own observations, Baker creates a detailed drawing of the property, the proposed projects and their costs. This is his “ultimate plan” for the landscaping, depicting projects for the present and the future. After the clients review his proposal, Baker works with them to prioritize the projects, set a budget, and refine the plan.

The final step is the landscaping work. For a party or family event, the work can be done very quickly, the weather and season permitting. The spectacular transformation of the Eisenstats’ property – including cleaning up, hardscaping, transplanting, planting and event decorating – was accomplished in under two days by a crew of eight men overseen by Baker.

For the Eisenstats, the first priority was the front yard. They asked Baker to redesign the area, a small patch of grass overrun with English Ivy and enclosed behind a fence with a locked gate, to create a more open and welcoming space. Nothing elaborate or showy, but an attractive, easy-to-maintain yard.

Baker created a courtyard using the original fence – with the gate removed for a more open feel. He restructured the space around the existing flagstone walkway, removing the dense groundcover of ivy and creating a flower bed edged with gleaming white Belgian block. For the B’Nei Mitzvah weekend he filled the bed with seasonal annuals: mums in pinks and golds, and green and purple kale. On the other side of the walkway, he recreated the lawn.

In the far left of the courtyard, Baker replaced another dark expanse of ivy with a second flower bed edged in the white stones, into which he transplanted several large, mature azaleas from the front of the house, where they had been crowding the front steps and blocking the view from the porch. The azaleas not only brightened the dark space, but created a visual screen – drawing the eye away from the parked cars, the traffic on Lincoln Drive and McCallum Street and the neighbors. Outside the fence, at the curb, Baker installed flagstones (creating a firm plateau for guests exiting their cars) and added color with more mums and kale.

The Eisenstats also asked Baker to update their backyard, a stretch of grass between the house and the woods behind it. They wanted to use the space for entertaining during the Friday night dinner and to enjoy the space as a family once the B’Nei Mitzvah weekend ended.

The backyard didn’t need to be redesigned. But it did need to be cleaned up. The space was dominated by a swing set, sliding board, sandbox, all of which Ben and Aaron had outgrown, and a vast array of outdoor toys accumulated over the previous twelve years. Leftover bricks, flagstones and wood were piled under the two-story deck.
Baker removed the play structures and the Eisenstats undertook the necessary – and surprisingly easy – task of throwing away twelve years of toys.

“It wasn’t an emotional thing for me,” Rosenbaum admits. “I realized this was a new phase in life. The yard was a mess with broken and scattered toys. It was just the vehicle for the boys to get to the woods. I was excited about having it cleaned up and having a more livable yard for us. I wasn’t sad about the broken trucks, although there were some sentimental toys – the riding trucks they got for their first birthday. And we’d been doing this inside the house over the years – changing the way we use our house as the boys grew. It was time to do the same outside.”

And how did Aaron and Ben feel about the cleanup? According to their mother, they were fine with it. The boys had no interest in the old toys or the play structures, although they insisted on choosing their successors for the sliding board. (They gave it to another family in the neighborhood for whom they baby-sit).

Baker also built a small patio for the Eisenstats’ barbecue equipment and a storage space under the deck using the surplus bricks.

Landscaping for special events

When landscaping for parties and events, Baker often includes ornamental elements that don’t become permanent parts of the property: decorative planters, seasonal plants in pots, and landscaped montages, for example.

For the B’Nei Mitzvah weekend, Baker decorated the Eisenstats’ front porch with two large wooden planters along the left side, window boxes along the front, and a lattice trellis along the right side of the porch. Not simply decorative, these elements created physical boundaries on the porch, which has no railing around it, and screened the guests from the sights and sounds of the traffic and the neighborhood.

Baker designed the landscaping on the porch to relate to the heart of the weekend – the B’Nei Mitzvah. He created living “twin sculptures” symbolizing the two boys who were being honored: two weeping dogwood trees – “the same age, about the same size, yet different, just like Aaron and Ben” – surrounded by mums, kale, pumpkins and baskets of ivy. He used seasonal elements such as gourds, corn stalks and indian corn in the window boxes and on the trellis, echoing the harvest decorations used for the B’Nei Mitzvah service and luncheon at the synagogue.

Advance planning

Although he can work within just about any time frame, Baker recommends planning landscape projects as far in advance of an event as possible. He prefers meeting with clients at least six months in advance. A full year is ideal.

Landscaping is by nature seasonal and some work – transplanting plants and shrubs to new locations, planting spring flowering bulbs or seeding lawns, for example – can only be done during certain times of the year. And if he has a full year, Baker can see and evaluate the property in every season.