One hazy afternoon, a green pickup truck pulls in front of Elizabeth Peoples' home in West Oak Lane, and out jumps supervisor Jeff Daniels and two teen workers, all in matching T-shirts. They unload lawn mowers and hedge clippers and begin to maintain the beauty they had created a few weeks earlier.

The crew, Teens Go Green, a new venture operated by neighborhood teenagers, has a mission this summer: to make West Oak Lane the most attractive neighborhood in the city.

In late spring, Peoples' backyard was an overgrown jungle of bushes and weeds in desperate need of shaping and mulch. Her front lawn was a perennial graveyard. The yew shrubs grew wild.

Peoples, 72, has lived in a corner house on Ogontz Avenue for almost 40 years and has operated a beauty salon in her basement nearly as long.

In her yard, throughout the years, she enjoyed dinner and other quiet moments. Throughout the summer, she hosted family cookouts and birthday parties there.

"So I want it to look nice," she says of her backyard oasis. "But I can't do it myself." Arthritis, she says. "But I know about landscaping. My father was a landscaper. So I know what it's supposed to look like."

For Teens Go Green, which opened for business in the spring, Peoples offers the perfect opportunity.

The program's mission is to give young people the opportunity to learn a marketable skill and provide a service to the community.

In Peoples' yard, Jaleel Buie, 17, a rising senior at Martin Luther King High School, tackles the weeds in the garden of daisies, marigolds, and begonias he helped design and plant a few weeks ago.

Behind him, Khalif Moore, 19, who just finished his freshman year at Montgomery County Community College, pushes a lawn mower.

Daniels, 45, a professional landscaper for more than 20 years, grabs a mower and heads to the front of the house, where the crew recently planted a bed of annuals.

Teens Go Green is sponsored by the nonprofit Urban Tree Connection, which helps urban communities transform abandoned eyesores into green spaces. It is also sponsored by Foundations Inc. and MLK High School.

Under Daniels' expertise and supervision, two crews of three teens work 20 hours a week on lawn maintenance, flower beds, small vegetable gardens, light tree work, and mulching, at $7.25 an hour.

Back in the West Philadelphia office, another teen helps with invoicing, record-keeping, and marketing.

With summer heating up, the business has 46 clients.

The program's seven students were selected based on their maturity, leadership qualities, and previous landscaping experience, said Urban Tree Connection founder and executive director Skip Weiner.

"Even if they never go into the landscaping business," Weiner says, "the skills that are being learned, how to operate on a job, are extremely important.

"And they get a much greater sense of environmental issues and how they operate in the community."

Growing up in West Oak Lane, Buie used landscaping as an odd job, "so this was up my alley," he says.

With the program's steadier work, he's saving for college, where he plans to study psychology.