I'm Krister Svensson — the Big Swede, Weston High class of '05, dad of two boys, owner of Magnus the yellow lab, and the person who shows up to do the work.

I grew up here. I moved away. I came back. I'm raising my family in the town that raised me, and Weston Ivy League is the business I built for the kind of property the town is full of: mature lots, stone walls, wooded edges, gardens worth protecting.

Every survey, every proposal, every removal, every 30-day return visit — that's me. No subcontractors. No seasonal crews. No dispatcher routing your job to someone you've never met.

Weston Ivy League started in my own backyard. I found poison ivy creeping in along a stone wall and wanted it gone — without herbicide, without "we'll see when we get there" language, without a two-year waitlist.

What I found was an industry that wasn't built for careful residential work. The default approach in Weston is a landscaper with a spray tank. The few specialty options I could find had pricing that didn't make sense for a small job, vague scopes, and no clear answer to the questions a homeowner actually asks: where is the plant, how much is there, what exactly will be removed, and what happens if it comes back.

So I built the service I wanted to hire.

Click to enlarge.

My work happens where people live: garden beds, stone walls, tree bases, dog paths, play areas, fence lines. The places where children touch things, where pets sleep in the grass, where you weed in the morning without thinking about it.

Herbicide can kill poison ivy. It can also drift into the perennial bed you've spent ten years building. It can persist in soil. It can leave dead vines on a tree that still carry urushiol for years.

Spray is a treatment. Hand-pulling is removal. On a residential property, that distinction matters.

Killed is not cleared.

The first thing I learned doing this work in Weston is that homeowners almost always underestimate the size of the problem. The patch by the stone wall is also climbing three trees. The seedlings in the perennial bed are connected to a runner system under the lawn. The "small spot" in the back is the visible edge of a fifteen-year root infrastructure.

So before I price the removal, I walk the property and find what's actually there. That's the Poison Ivy Survey — a paid on-site field assessment that produces a custom property map, photo documentation, and a fixed-price proposal scoped to the active zones I identify.

The survey costs $300, $450, or $650 by acreage. It's credited toward removal if you approve the proposal within 7 days.

I do it this way because pricing poison ivy work without seeing the property is guesswork. And guesswork is what the industry I tried to hire was offering me.

Removal is manual labor. I pull the identified poison ivy in the approved work zones by hand — leaves, stems, vines, crowns, and roots — leaving the surrounding landscape intact. A standard project produces eight to ten contractor bags, hauled offsite the same day. Larger or multi-day projects are scoped accordingly.

I document the work with before/after photos. I bag and dispose of debris responsibly. Then I come back around day 30 to inspect the cleared zones and pull anything that regrew from missed roots, at no charge.

Most contractors leave the moment the bags are loaded. I come back.

The reason I can survey the way I survey, price the way I price, and return the way I return is that I work alone. No subcontractors. No seasonal crews. No dispatcher routing your job to someone else.

That puts a ceiling on how many properties I can take. It also means the person who walked your property with a UV flashlight is the person who pulls the plant, the person who hauls the bags, and the person who comes back in 30 days.

Weston is my full service area — residential and institutional, no surcharges, no scheduling caveats. I take Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury, and Wellesley projects case by case when the scope fits hand-pulling and the schedule allows.

I don't take work outside those five towns for residential projects. Going further dilutes the model — the survey, the careful removal, the 30-day return visit. The geographic discipline is what makes the rest of the work possible.

See the full service area →

Weston Ivy League LLC is licensed in the Town of Weston, Massachusetts. I carry full general liability insurance. Certificate available on request, especially for institutional clients, property managers, and HOAs.

If you're a school facilities director or camp administrator, you can also see my M.G.L. c. 132B-aware approach for institutional clients.

Send photos of what you can see. I'll find what you can't. Read more about the Poison Ivy Survey, browse the proposal process, or request a survey directly.