The land along the banks of Honey Creek, like elsewhere in Milwaukee County, provides a crucial bridge connecting green spaces and their native species of plants and animals. Despite human encroachment and neglect some of that land contains otherwise rare species in Milwaukee County, including twin leaf, a spring ephemeral flower, and the hoptree, which grows along woodland borders often dominated by the invasive buckthorn. The area also has a large number of animals including white tailed deer, coyotes, foxes, and beavers. 

Honey Creek, a tributary of the Menomonee River, has been constantly affected by human beings over the last century. In the 1930s a Civilian Conservation Corps project created a number of walls in the riverbed, meant to control flooding and the gradual erosion of the banks of the river. Those walls can be seen throughout the area south of Hart Park.  In the 1950s and 1960s a more ill-begotten flood management project created a concrete channel in the area south of Portland Ave. to replace the natural streambank; by the then-new highway the creek was forced underground and today runs under State Fair Park.  A now on-hold project of the Army Corps of Engineers would aim to replace the natural riverbank north of Bluemound Road and restore the New Deal-built walls farther east.