The upper 100 square foot flagstone patio follows a black locust plank boardwalk down the bluff to a 260 square foot covered terrace overlook. The overlook patio was constructed with a mixture of flagstone and black locust log “cookies”. The back retaining wall consists of black locust logs and the cedar log roof was covered in engineered soil with coir matting and planted with nearly 200 plugs of native grasses and forbs. Black locust stairs continue down the bluff from the overlook and descend to the covered boathouse. The boathouse was constructed of dry stack stone with a Douglas fir beam roof finished with custom copper shingles. The boathouse faces 500 square feet of flagstone patio and a custom fire pit with five large limestone rocks for seating.

Another fun and challenging aspect of this project was the rerouting of a natural spring on the property to create a recirculating water feature. Additionally, Marek utilized a steep slope restoration technique that uses a compost- based bio-engineered soil matrix with close to 50 species of native plant grasses, sedges, and forbs to increase initial stability, weed resistance, and early native plant germination.

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Marek Landscaping’s stewardship team has continued to provide services at the Milwaukee River’s East Bank to further manage and eradicate the invasive species that remain. In February 2021, we facilitated a community buckthorn removal event to help accelerate progress towards those goals and to encourage community involvement. Future work along the East Bank will continue to focus on invasive species management and will include planting of native grasses, sedges, forbs, and trees to enhance existing vegetative communities and wetlands.

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Southeastern Wisconsin Invasive Species Consortium (SEWISC) has been raising funds and awareness for invasive species control since 2007. SEWISC functions as a Cooperative Weed Management Area and promotes invasive species management in an 8-county region including Sheboygan, Washington, Ozaukee, Waukesha, Milwaukee, Walworth, Racine, and Kenosha.

Marek Landscaping’s involvement with the SEWISC- Wild Chervil Control project began in 2017 in Muskego on a small site needing additional Wild Chervil intervention; a 0.6-acre area just off of N Cape Road. While the past 4 years of our prescribed treatments have dramatically reduced the population of Wild Chervil in the designated area, the neighboring untreated property continues to have an uncontrolled population of Wild Chervil.

Our Wild Chervil mitigation efforts continued in 2018-2020 with our undertaking of five acres along the Hank Aaron Trail to the east of S Hawley Road in Milwaukee, and six more miles along rural roadside to the north, in Cedarburg.

Wild Chervil is best controlled by an herbicide treatment in early to mid-May with a follow up in early June.

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Natural stone stairs lead into the patio space lined with cor-ten steel, floating black locust benches, and two custom cor-ten steel planters. Ten-foot black locust posts were installed in the corners to allow for café-style string lights to be hung. Ten square feet of concrete, which made up much of the original patio, was removed to increase the available planting space. A pattern was cut into the portion of concrete that was not removed to add texture and blend in with the transformed landscape.

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“We put the bio in bio-engineering”

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