Summit earned its name honestly — the city sits on a ridge of the Watchung Mountains, and nearly every property in town works with a grade. AP Mazzilli Landscaping has been designing, building, and maintaining Summit landscapes for over fifteen years from our base in nearby Westfield, and we know what this market expects: a higher standard. Summit is a town with a celebrated arboretum, a thriving downtown, and some of the most valuable residential real estate in New Jersey. Landscaping here isn't an afterthought — it's part of what a Summit property is.
That standard shapes how we work in Summit: design-first thinking, plantings chosen for four-season structure rather than a single June bloom, hardscape built to last decades, and maintenance crews that keep a property looking installed all year. This page covers the services we provide in Summit, what makes the city's hillside properties unique, the problems we solve most often here, and answers to common questions. When you're ready, request a free estimate and we'll walk the property with you.
Our landscaping services in Summit
Full-service landscape design, construction, and care — scaled from a focused front-yard renovation to complete property management:
Landscape design & installation
Layered, architectural planting design that matches Summit's homes — colonials, Tudors, and Victorians that deserve more than a row of foundation evergreens. We design for four-season interest: structure from boxwood and hollies, successive waves of bloom, summer texture, and fall color, with specimen trees placed to mature gracefully. Summit clients often come to us after visiting the Reeves-Reed Arboretum with a phone full of photos — we speak that language fluently and design plantings with the same horticultural intent.
Terracing, retaining walls & hardscaping
On a hillside city, the difference between a yard you look at and a yard you live in is structure. We design and build natural stone and segmental retaining walls, terraced gardens, bluestone patios, entry walks, and steps that turn Summit's grades into usable, dramatic outdoor space. Every wall is engineered for its site — proper footings, drainage stone, and reinforcement where the height demands it — because a wall on a Summit slope has real work to do.
Lawn care & maintenance
Weekly maintenance programs built for properties where the standard is set high: consistent crews, crisp bed edges, pruning timed to each species, and lawns managed with aeration, overseeding, and fertilization programs rather than just a weekly cut. For larger Summit properties we run full-service care — turf, beds, shrubs, seasonal color rotations, and cleanups — so the whole landscape is one accountable contractor's responsibility.
Privacy screening & specimen planting
Summit properties invest in privacy done beautifully — not a wall of identical arborvitae, but layered evergreen screens that mix species, heights, and textures so the boundary reads as a garden rather than a fence. We also source and install specimen trees and mature plant material when a project calls for instant presence, with the soil preparation and aftercare that protects that investment.
Drainage & erosion control
Water moves fast on Summit's grades. We correct eroding slopes, washed-out beds, flooded walkways, and water heading toward foundations with regrading, French drains, dry wells, channel drains across sloped driveways, and planted stabilization that holds hillsides through storm seasons. Drainage on a slope is a system — we design it that way instead of patching symptoms.
Understanding Summit's landscape
Summit's defining feature is elevation. The city rides the Second Watchung ridge, which gives it the views, the walkable hilltop downtown — and the grades that make landscaping here a structural discipline as much as a horticultural one. Front yards pitch toward the street, backyards fall away from the house, and driveways cut across slopes. Done well, that terrain produces the most dramatic landscapes in Union County: terraced gardens, stone walls, layered plantings that read beautifully from below. Done poorly, it produces erosion, runoff, and lawns that scalp on every mowing pass.
The city's horticultural culture runs deep — the Reeves-Reed Arboretum has been educating Summit gardeners for a century, and it shows in what homeowners here notice and expect. Summit clients ask better questions about plant selection than any town we serve, and we enjoy answering them.
Property character varies by neighborhood: generous lots with mature specimen trees in the estate sections, compact Victorian-era properties closer to downtown and the train station, and everything between. What they share is value — Summit real estate rewards landscape investment as reliably as anywhere in New Jersey, and a dated or neglected landscape visibly costs a property against its block. Between the grades, the trees, and the standard, Summit is demanding terrain. It's also where our design and stonework get to do their best work.
Common landscape challenges Summit homeowners face
Five problems dominate our Summit estimate requests:
1. Slopes that limit how the property gets used. A backyard that falls away steeply is scenery, not space. Terracing with retaining walls — one level for dining, one for lawn, one for planting — converts grade into rooms. It's the single most transformative investment on a hillside property, and it's the project we build most often in Summit.
2. Erosion and storm runoff. Mulch in the driveway after every downpour, beds thinning at the top of slopes, ruts across lawns. Hillside erosion needs a combined fix — grade structure, subsurface drainage, and deep-rooted plantings — because any single measure alone fails within a season or two.
3. Aging landscapes on beautiful homes. Summit's housing stock is gracious and its plantings are often thirty years past their prime — overgrown foundation evergreens, leggy rhododendrons, beds that lost their design intent decades ago. A renovation that respects the home's architecture pays for itself instantly in curb appeal at Summit property values.
4. Shade and root competition under mature trees. The specimen oaks and maples that make Summit properties special also thin the lawns beneath them. We manage the trade-off honestly: shade-tolerant turf where grass can win, and designed shade gardens — hellebores, ferns, hydrangeas, groundcovers — where it can't.
5. Privacy without a green wall. Close sightlines between substantial homes call for screening with design intent. Mixed evergreen and flowering layers give Summit properties privacy that looks like landscape, not infrastructure — and holds up better than any single-species hedge when disease or winter burn hits.
Recent Summit projects
The photos below show recent AP Mazzilli work on Summit properties and comparable hillside terrain nearby — terracing and retaining walls, four-season planting designs, drainage corrections, and full-property renovations. Every project starts with a free on-site consultation so we can read the grade, the light, and the soil before we propose anything.