Four acres of unbroken lawn. That’s what the Asharoken property was when Spadefoot arrived — a resource-intensive monoculture that required constant mowing and gave little back to the land or the ecosystem around it. The goal was biodiversity, reduced maintenance, and a landscape that actually meant something.
The challenge was considerable. The site alternated between extreme heat and dryness in some zones and seasonal inundation in others, with a shallow water table complicating the seeding work throughout. The solution required expert seed mix curation — testing, persistence, and a willingness to adapt — before the right species combinations were found for each micro-condition on the property.
What emerged was a four-acre meadow threaded with meandering lawn pathways and destination garden nodes — points of visual and ecological interest tucked within forested pockets and open swaths of native grasses. The result was not just a functioning habitat, but a designed landscape: wild in character, intentional in form. Northern bobwhites, a grassland bird of conservation concern, have since been documented breeding on the property.
Site condition when you arrived: A two-acre field of turfgrass and crabgrass that was rarely used by the client, required regular mowing, and offered little to no ecological value.
Client’s primary goal or concern: A more appealing alternative to turfgrass — a landscape that supported biodiversity, reduced maintenance, and actually meant something on the property.
Spadefoot completely transformed our backyard. They removed all the invasive plants and replaced them with beautiful native species.
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They were interested in biodiversity, but also concerned that, you know, it would, it wouldn’t look good. Basically, they wanted to make sure that, you know, although they wanted to help the environment, they also wanted to make sure that their, you know, their summer, you know, hideaway, pool, hide, it didn’t look like it was like in the mess of them, you know, in the midst of a messy jungle.
Paid careful attention to layering, so we didn’t use some taller native plants, but those are all towards the back, and as you got closer to the to the to the build structures you had, you know, successfully shorter plant species that we used, a combination of plants to ensure that there’s something almost always in bloom. And, you know, we created a subtle bioswale area to take on extra stormwater from from like, the nearby built structures that would otherwise flood the area.
