AP Mazzilli Landscaping serves Fanwood from our base in neighboring Westfield — close enough that our crews pass through the borough every working day. Fanwood packs a lot of character into 1.3 square miles: a walkable downtown anchored by the historic Victorian train station, tree-lined residential blocks, and a housing mix that runs from station-district Victorians to the capes, splits, and colonials that filled in the borough through the mid-1900s. It's a small town where properties sit close together and front yards are on display — which means the landscaping standard on any given block is set by the best yard on it.
We've spent over fifteen years helping Fanwood homeowners be that yard. This page covers the services we provide in the borough, what makes Fanwood properties tick, the problems we're called about most, and answers to the questions Fanwood homeowners ask us. When you're ready, request a free estimate and we'll walk your property with you — usually within a few days.
Our landscaping services in Fanwood
Everything a Fanwood property needs, from a one-time front-yard transformation to year-round care:
Landscape design & installation
Custom planting plans and full-yard makeovers matched to the home. Fanwood's older houses — especially the Victorians near the station and the pre-war homes on the surrounding blocks — deserve landscapes that fit their character: layered foundation plantings, defined bed lines, and period-appropriate structure instead of the overgrown evergreens most of them are wearing now. For the borough's capes and split-levels, we design clean, low-maintenance front yards that lift the whole streetscape.
Hardscaping, patios & walkways
Front walkways, entry steps, patios, and outdoor living spaces. On Fanwood's compact lots a well-designed bluestone or paver walkway does double duty — it's the first impression from the sidewalk and the spine the rest of the front yard organizes around. Backyards here don't need to be big to be great: a right-sized patio with a defined edge turns a 50-by-100 lot into a real outdoor room.
Lawn care & maintenance
Weekly mowing, fertilization, aeration, overseeding, and seasonal programs. Fanwood's mostly level lots are genuinely good lawn country — when the soil is opened up with annual aeration and the shady sections are seeded with the right blend. Our maintenance clients get the same crew on a consistent schedule, which is how a lawn stays sharp week after week instead of just getting cut.
Seasonal cleanups & mulching
Spring cleanups that reset the property — bed edges, pre-emergent, fresh mulch at the correct depth — and fall cleanups sized for the borough's mature oak and maple canopy, which drops far more leaf volume than a small lot seems like it should have to handle. We keep beds clean, gutter lines clear, and perennials cut back before winter.
Drainage solutions
Fanwood's low-lying sections hold water — soggy lawn stripes that stay wet for days, beds that drown out every spring, and water creeping toward foundations on the flatter blocks. Flat ground means water has nowhere to go unless you give it somewhere: we fix these properties with regrading, French drains, dry wells, and downspout management that moves roof water away from the house instead of dumping it at the foundation.
Understanding Fanwood's landscape
Fanwood is one of Union County's smallest boroughs, wrapped almost entirely by Scotch Plains, and its landscape character comes from two things: its age and its flatness. The blocks around the historic district grew up with the railroad, and the mature shade trees planted over the last century now define the borough — beautiful streets, real summer shade, and all the landscaping consequences that come with a big canopy: thin lawns underneath, surface roots, and serious autumn leaf drop.
The flat terrain cuts both ways. It makes for usable yards and good lawns, but it also means drainage is a design problem rather than a gravity problem. The borough's lower sections hold water after storms, and on small lots a neighbor's runoff quickly becomes your soggy side yard. Solving it takes actual grading work and subsurface drainage, not just hoping the ground dries out.
Lot sizes are modest — most homes sit on quarter-acre-or-less parcels — which concentrates the design challenge into the same questions we solve in neighboring Garwood: how to create privacy from close-set neighbors, how to make a compact backyard feel bigger than it is, and how to give a front yard genuine curb appeal in a town where everyone walks past it on the way to the train.
Common landscape challenges Fanwood homeowners face
Five problems come up in Fanwood estimates again and again:
1. Soggy lawns and standing water. Flat ground, aging clay-streaked soil, and roof runoff with nowhere to go. We solve it at the source — downspout extensions or buried drains first, then regrading and French drains where the lawn itself holds water. A yard that squishes in May is fixable, and usually in less than a week of work.
2. Foundation plantings older than the mortgage. Overgrown yews and junipers hiding the front of otherwise charming older homes. A clean removal and a modern layered replanting is the single highest-impact project on most Fanwood blocks — the house visibly reappears.
3. Lawns thinning under mature shade. The borough's century-old canopy means many front lawns get only a few hours of direct sun. Shade-tolerant fescue blends, high mowing, and annual overseeding keep grass respectable; where a spot is genuinely too dark, we'll design a groundcover bed that looks intentional instead of apologetic.
4. Privacy on close-set lots. Fanwood homes sit near their property lines, and backyard privacy takes planning. We build mixed evergreen screens — arborvitae blended with holly, spruce, and flowering layers — that give real coverage without the dead-hedge monoculture look, sized so they won't swallow the yard in ten years.
5. Small backyards that don't earn their keep. A compact lot with no layout is just a lawn with a fence. A defined patio, a planting border, and one good focal point turn the same footprint into an outdoor room the family actually uses. Small-space design is a specialty of ours across Fanwood, Garwood, and the borough blocks of Westfield.
Recent Fanwood projects
The photos below show recent AP Mazzilli work in and around Fanwood — front-yard renovations, walkway and patio installs, drainage corrections, and full-property makeovers on compact lots. Every project starts with a free on-site consultation so we can see the property and give you an honest, detailed quote.