WLCA Awards 2025

LandWorks is honored to receive Gold: Residential Landscape Design & Construction, Silver: Special Projects, and the Judges' Choice Award at the 2025 WLCA Awards Banquet.

A Team Effort

Gold: Residential Landscape Design & Construction
Judges’ Choice

Our client had a new lake home build underway, needing significant landscape architectural problem solving. With the large size of the home and its tricky setbacks and conservation easements, we needed to come up with a plan to navigate a 17ft grade change between their terrace and their boathouse that was only 29 feet away. Additionally, we needed to provide for some substantial mitigation via a large stormwater collection system that we co-created with the project’s builder and civil engineer.

The grading challenge was solved by designing a complicated switchback stair system with curving walls having necessary inner and outer brick ledges formed and poured from our plans. Chases for utilities, irrigation, lighting and drainage piping were also provided for in the walls. Thousands of face-feet of veneer on the poured walls was done by our crew during winter months, under heated plastic tenting. A grand stairway was made from large sawed gray granite slabs. An additional rustic grotto-like staircase near the detached garage was made of Pennsylvania Bluestone and snugged in with a tapestry of herbaceous plantings.

The stormwater issue was handled with hundreds of feet of deeply buried large diameter perforated PVC piping, gathering subsurface drainage from the substantial front and rear gravel auto-courts. Rare discharges are directed into a large woodland rain garden. For vehicular functionality, the gravel motor courts were topped with geosynthetic fabric covered with engineered rigid PVC geo-grids, swept in with 5/8” washed gravel capable of supporting cars and medium trucks.

Regarding the softscape portions of the project, our master plan called for several very large specimen trees including musclewood, redbud and whitebud, serviceberry, magnolia, plane-tree, katsura, coffeetree and last but not least, a 16” diameter European Beech tree that was dug balled in burlap and trucked on a huge low-deck trailer.

Other than some woods and a small lawn area lakeside, the site is now occupied by over 16,000 perennials, grasses and sedges – in garden areas co-designed by renowned Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf and his frequent Wisconsin-based collaborator, the respected plantsman Roy Diblik. Joining Piet and Roy on our horticultural “dream team” was the late great Bernie Jacobs and his Landscape Architectural practice co-director Terry Ryan (our large tree “sorcerers”), from Chicago and Illinois-based garden designer Austin Eischeid who helped with layout.

Between the project’s unique challenges and a significant team effort, this truly turned into a memorable bucket list experience!

A Team Effort

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Pastoral Pathways

Silver: Special Projects

 Our client has a farm in South Eastern Wisconsin that is literally a living horticultural museum. Focusing on the Jeffersonian Era, he has created many feature gardens and spaces that use only plantings and accessories known to be used in American gardens between 1769 and 1826. He has also been acquiring and caring for livestock known to be common on farms of that era.

Our client reached out one day and said he wished to add a maze or labyrinth that would be positioned in his front meadow. Labyrinths were quite popular back in the Jeffersonian era, He asked if our company had any experience with making a feature like this and in fact we had constructed a few different ones over the years. Most labyrinths are made with stone paths and alternating bands of flowering plants, but our client wanted the authentic style – a mow-able lawn labyrinth.

Our client shared the historic design that he wished to use (an adaptation of the 800 year-old “Medieval” or “Chartres” Cathedral design) and the size that he was looking for (60 feet across). We offered an estimate to construct, which he approved.

A pattern was provided that was printed on six large 10 ft. by 60 ft. gauze panels. Despite a steady but mild cross-wind, the crew was able to line up the middle panel with an onsite staked true-north axis, and our crew pinned hundreds of small stakes along the lines of the pattern as each of the remaining pattern panels were fitted into position. Then the panels were carefully lifted off or cut away, revealing a staked version of the pattern in the 8-inch-high meadow grass. Next step was to use a 21-inch lawn mower with its deck set to cut at 4 inches high. When mowing was completed, the stakes were pulled, and the Lawn Labyrinth, with its two-tier lawn height design was finished.

Adjacent to the Labyrinth, our client will likely add some antique European urns and planted troughs over time, to make this into an interesting and inviting space on his farm.

Pastoral Pathways

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