The backyard at this Port Jefferson Station home had good bones – a mature native forest canopy still standing overhead. But the understory had been completely overtaken by invasive wisteria, bittersweet, and burning bush, turning what should have been a living woodland into a tangled, unusable mess.
Spadefoot executed a full design-build restoration: removing truckloads of invasive material while carefully preserving every native plant already on the property. In their place, we introduced additional native tree saplings, shrubs, and herbs selected to restore the full layered structure of a healthy woodland understory.
The project demonstrates a principle at the heart of Spadefoot’s work — that restoration isn’t always about starting from scratch. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is clear what’s choking a healthy system and let it breathe again.
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.
