Legends Landscape of Louisiana

Inexperienced. Highly unprofessional. Do not care about their customers. Would not recommend Makaira / Jeb Barber. P.S. After a terrible experience we Makaira, we ended up having to pay another firm in town to do the work we had already paid / engaged Makaira for — the other firm is doing great. We also previously had a successful design and execution of a front + backyard hardscape and landscape project when we lived in another state. Point being, we have worked with 3 landscape firms in the last 10 years — we’d give the other two firms 5 stars, however Makaira certainly performed as a 1 star.

We had Makaira landscape design and landscape our front yard. While the design of the landscaping is beautiful the job that we were left with was unfinished and poor quality to say the least. Makaira landscape did not prep the flower bed site properly before installing over 300 plants. Because of poor preparation we had to have our local landscape company as well as ourselves pull up plants and redo the entire landscape. When installing the beds Makaira scraped the top layer of grass leaving the grass seeds and roots underneath everything. We have photos that show they planted right on top of the scraped grass. No weed barrier was placed anywheres in the flower beds except for the rock bed against the house, o treatment of soil was done or removal of grass except for the top. Because of this we had grass growing in all of the beds so thick we were not able to keep it maintained. (Not knowing what we know now, we had no clue this should have been done differently. But because we trusted Makaira and thought they would surely prepare their job sites properly to ensure their clients have the best possible outcome, we were left with beds that looked beautiful but slowly started to be something we could not maintain. We have a local landscape company who does routine maintenance for us and were coming out and weeding and treating. This company informed us that we would never be able to maintain the beds as they should be due to improper installation and preparation. We reached out to another landscape company as well and they said the same thing after coming to access the situation. After paying Makaira more than 25 thousand dollars we had to pay another company thousands more to come and correct their issues. We had to pull plants up in sections that were really bad and till the area, treat the soil, remove all grass roots, put down weed barriers and then replant and remulch everything. In other areas we removed all mulch, put down the weed barrier after treating the grass growth and then remulched to help the issue. We have been working on correcting this problem since March. Our beds were installed in late November. We reached out to Makaira about this and we were told the owner would come out and take a look because surely he would agree with the other professionals we had come out that they did not in fact prep correctly. After 3 months of emailing with little to no response and Jeb never coming to look at the job, in July we were told weekly maintenance should take care of this weed issue by the project manager and nothing further from Jeb, the owner. However it’s not weeds, it’s grass the grass that was there prior to installation. It’s not lack of maintenance causing the issue is lack of correct installation and preparation. While I wanted to use Makaira again for our backyard landscape I sadly will never recommend them nor use them again.

Makaira did an excellent job with our landscape/irrigation project. Super convenient to have a company design, then build our dream landscape. Having the owner meet us on site to start the design, then the amazing team come and bring the renderings to life made the process easy, and we felt like their entire team was just as excited about our project as we were. We get even more peace of mind now that we have signed up to have maintenance done with them as well. Highly recommended!