Meadow Gardens

This is an excerpt from the Book called “The Authentic Garden“ by Richard Hartlage and Sandy Fischer. Continue reading to learn more about Meadow Gardens, thanks to the author.

Piet Mondrian

Recent interest in interpreting ecology artfully has led to the use of native plants in contemporary landscapes, particularly in ways that emulate to some degree how they appear in the wild. This began Ian McHarg (1920-2001), who transmitted his ideas through teaching and extensive writing, and who has influenced the last two generations of design professionals. Phlox, black-eyed Susans, monarda, baptisia, and coneflowers are all now treated like prairie plants that have gone to finishing school-meadows are in vogue. Wild, casual plantings that often include little bluestem and switch grass also form a good aesthetic counterpoint to modern architecture because they add visual interest but not fussy adornment. Planting native landscapes-formerly a specialized skill-is growing into a more widespread craft. Meadows were usually only to be found in botanical gardens, parks, and large open-space restorations a few years ago, now they’re often introduced into urban and residential projects.

Prairies and meadows are both deceptively complex ecosystems. The terms are used interchangeably in most landscape planning and the types of plants found in each natural community are substantially similar, but scale is the biggest differentiator-prairies are large and expansive and often cover many square miles while meadows are simply smaller. Each also encompasses a range of native ecological types: wet and dry meadows, meadows at varying elevations, those that grow on soils with pH extremes, and so on. This volume does not cover ecological restoration of native ecosystems, which are typically implemented on a large scale and use only locally available ecotypes of plants from the region or project site. Restoring native ecologies takes planning and often is a multiyear commitment. Ideally seeds are collected from adjacent or nearby ecosystems and propagated. This type of project is usually the domain of biologists or restoration ecologists, rather than landscape design professionals. Landscape design firms that specialize in landscape restoration, however, do exist.

The earliest “constructed” meadows were created by indigenous peoples who burned off forestland to create and maintain hunting grounds. Although meadow plantings are an environmentally sustainable form of garden, the perception that meadows are much less maintenance than conventional gardens is far from the truth. Artificially created meadows can be a rich and inspirational expression of both grasses and perennials-or forbs, as they are known in a native prairie system. Meadows are lower maintenance once established, but in most designed applications they count as a manmade ecotype.

Practical Considerations

Creating meadows with diverse species takes five to ten years. First, a matrix of primary species must be established; secondary species are added over time. Warm-season grasses and associated forbs are easiest to establish. They predominate in areas where summer rainfall of twenty inches or more can sustain growth even in the heat. These plants establish rapidly and crowd out invasive or undesirable species quickly.

Weeding is the most costly investment related to establishing new meadows, as they require constant attention until the native plants are established enough to outcompete the unwanted species. Drier summer climates make this process more difficult and require a longer establishment period. Cool-season grasses will predominate; though grow slowly since they go dormant in the heat of the summer as an adaptive response to climate.

Though the focus for meadow is often on the use of native plants, many designers also create meadows that include nonnative species, mixing and matching adapted plants found in meadow and prairie ecologies on other continents. For example John Greenlee, a designer based in California, uses his expertise in grass ecology to create meadows. He does not strictly interpret or practice making meadows with only North American native plants, however. He is most interested in creating beautiful places above all, and in using sustainable plants to reduce the resources required to maintain a landscape.

There are two or three main ways to install a meadow-style planting. The least expensive material cost is seeding. However, plants grown from seed take longer to establish and initially require more weeding, resulting in higher maintenance costs.

Installing plugs is more expensive, but these plants establish more rapidly so maintenance costs during establishment are proportionately less. A hybrid approach is to seed the major species and add plugs for diversity. It is critical to understand that this is a lengthy process; otherwise impatient owners will perceive the meadows as “weedy” and will be displeased with progress during the establishment phase.

It does take gardening experience and a deep knowledge of natural systems and the plants in those systems to understand how to plant in this style. One of the masters was the late gardening writer Christopher Lloyd, owner of Great Dixter in east Sussex, England. Lloyd was not stringent about the use of solely native plants. For maximum aesthetic interest, he used plants from various regions around the world that shared a similar ecology. He also established many rare and difficult species in meadows by seeding and plugging over several decades. The meadows that he created are biologically rich and can be considered the pinnacle of the form.

Meadows seeded as a design feature tend to be composed primarily of grass matrices and the more vigorous perennial species, simply because they germinate and establish quickly. A ratio of 60 percent grasses to 40 percent forbs is good rule of thumb. The time of seeding is critical and varies by region. Germination depends on rainfall and stratification needs of the various species used. Some seeds will not germinate unless they go through a cold period, i.e., winter. Most grasses will germinate as long as there is ample water and critical temperatures. Cool-season grasses need a lower soil temperate to germinate. Lawns are typically cool-season grasses, which is why they are shown in spring and fall. Warm-season grasses need warmer soil temperatures and are typically sown in early and late summer. If a meadow is sown in late summer, however, it is important to give it time to establish so it will survive the following winter. Yarrows and coneflowers, goldenrods, milkweeds, and joe-pye weeds are easy to establish through seeding. Baptisias and most bulbous perennials are difficult to seed and therefore are often added as plugs once the primary plant community is established from seed.

It is critical to understand the ecology of the site being worked with when selecting appropriate species. Most seeded meadows fail because plant selection was not thoroughly understood and poor or no germination was achieved; if weeds invade, no property owner will tolerate the result. Using plugs is much more expensive, but establishment is easier to control. The result is a meadow that is established more quickly, can be more diverse, and has instant impact. Soil preparation is the same-disturbance should be kept to a minimum to suppress weed seeds. Coordination with growers is required in advance so that all the species required are available at planting time. Meadows must be planned six months to a year ahead. Without planning, it is unlikely enough plants will be available. Most growers sell out quickly and each plant is on a different production schedule. With good planning, the slower-growing choices can be held and made available with the more rapid- growing crops. Warm-season plants fill in rapidly as plugs and achieve their intended effect in six to twelve months, as opposed to seeded projects, which can take two to three years. Over time, plants communities also drift and move; as a result, original plants installed as plugs will begin to self-seed. It is gratifying to watch a system become self-sustaining and take on a life of its own.

Artful Interpretations

Longwood Gardens in Delaware has opened an extraordinary meadow project encompassing 86 acres. After a road realignment, it was incorporated into the garden proper and opened to the public. For maximum impact and interest, additional forbs-perennials-were added to the extensive grasses on the site. This meadow has been in development for many years; part of the effort to integrate it with the rest of the garden focused on embedding it with plants that would flower sequentially throughout the growing season to add interest for visitors over the course of many months. New pathways, shelters, boardwalks, and unique bridges also help visitors move deep into the meadow. This, then is not an expression of a native ecology, but an interpretation of nature that is composed to inspire. It is extraordinary to look at this great expanse and to consider the amount of dedication involved in making it a reality.

Milk Williams has been working on the Simpson prairie near Crawford, Texas, for twenty years. Over that time, he has been able to introduce plants gradually and to compose a truly striking landscape. He straddles a line between ecological restoration and landscape design with the project, the remnant of an original prairie, and balances diversity with aesthetics. Increasing plant diversity over time allows a landscape to flower through a period of months to provide continuous color, again attracting visitors.

An institution created to entice the masses from the outset, the visitor center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York, designed by Weiss/Manfredi Architects and HMWhite, is surrounded by imaginative meadow plantings. The roof is planted with a tall- grass meadow, an unexpected feature for New York that attracts attention as soon as visitors approach and one that works well as a foil to the contemporary architecture. The metaphor of the wild coming to the city is immediately apparent. The tall grasses move in the wind and animate the structure throughout all four seasons. In addition, the plants manage storm water runoff from the structure and site.

At another city institution, the New York Botanical Garden, the renowned firm of Oehme, Van Sweden demonstrates how a variety of ecologies can coexist on one 3.5- acre site. Their Native Plant Garden gives visitors a complete experience of the diversity of meadow plants found in the Northeastern United States. More than 1,00,000 individual plants were used to create an extraordinary variety of microclimates. The sun-soaked, broad, open areas are immersive and expressive, and shaded areas featuring subtly intermingled ferns and fall- blooming asters highlight an often- overlooked type of beauty. The firm also took advantage of the topography to create wet meadows adjacent to a central cascading pool- also a storm water management feature- and dry meadows in the upland areas. A deep understanding of plants and native flora converges with design skill here to a craft a landscape that teaches by enticing visitors to stop and appreciate the painterly composition.

At Cornell Plantations in Ithaca, New York, Wolf Landscape Architecture designed a wet meadow intended to manage storm water runoff for a nontraditional space- a strip of land adjacent to a parking area. These wet meadows serve as bioretention and filtration gardens and also greet visitors with a dynamic, colorful, and engaging landscape that sets the tone for the rest of the garden experience. Rain gardens are now required in some municipalities, but all; too often they end up looking like planted ditches. Here they become a design feature in their own right and show that with a thoughtful and intentional eye, even a parking lot can become an aesthetic asset and provide a memorable sense of arrival. Tall grasses and joe- pye weed, in particular, impress with their sheer scale. By late summer, the rain gardens have become lush, expressive features that build anticipation about a visit to the rest of the arboretum.

Larry Weaner, a landscape designer based just outside of Philadelphia, tends to seed his meadows rather than using more expensive plugs, though he does employ both methods. He has added a very diverse, seeded meadow to an existing residential garden that covers a hillside in North Salem, New York that capitalizes in particular on one of grasses’ best advantages- their ability to catch light. Few other plants help a viewer appreciate just how dramatically light does change throughout the day. His other project featured here, Kosciuszko Park in Stamford, Connecticut, was also seeded. This approach is revealed in both gardens’ ultimate aesthetic: when a diverse mix of native meadow species is directly seeded into the ground, it yields a less- composed and more ecological community of plants because the various species germinate and grown on the site where they are best suited. Competition between species is a stronger component of the process, and it yields a different effect that is less intentional- looking, Perhaps, but more diverse. These two projects appear to be more loosely composed than some of the other meadow gardens featured here simply because of the method of execution.

Established more than ten years ago, the dry mountain meadow at the Denver Botanic gardens has recently come into its full potential thanks to the gardeners’ skill and long- term commitment to its welfare. Botanical gardens have the advantage of being maintained by skilled staff who remain interested in increasing species diversity over time, and their efforts have yielded a phenomenally diverse ecology in suburban Denver. Meadows are more difficult to establish in climates that receive little rainfall and are very dry in summer. Plants adapted to these drier regions also grow more slowly than plants in wet Eastern states; excluding nonnative, invasive plants is the trick to success. Weeding is a higher priority and an absolute necessity to get a native meadow fully established. This is expensive, and takes a real commitment on the part of the client. Here, a basic matrix of plants was established to achieve cover, then was supplemented with seeding and small plants to ad diversity.

Nelson Byrd Woltz is also an advocate of meadow planting, and the firm has introduced meadows in several of the private garden projects they have created. Their design for a residence in Connecticut, a 300- acre working farm, takes advantage of the site’s scale and hillside topography by enhancing its vistas with meadow grasses that draw the eye toward horizon paints and forests in the distance and embracing the property’s unique qualities, such as large ledges of exposed granite, by surrounding them with groupings of plants placed in a rhythmic arrangement that echoes the craggy striations of the rock. This approach celebrates the local landscape while also reducing maintenance for the homeowners.

Bernard Trainor, a designer with a practice based in Northern California, has become extraordinary adept at adapting the meadow approach to sites on the West Coast, and to arid conditions in particular. The interplay between architecture, landscape architecture, and site is integrated and inseparable; all orient views out over the Carmel Valley in his Halls Ridge Project. Trainor uses mass plantings of grasses to give the landscape a unified texture, which in turn impart an enhanced sense of space. Few or almost no flowers distract the eye; instead, the plantings near the house act as a foreground to an exquisitely framed distant view. In this way, the immediate landscape takes advantage of the larger landscape as well.

In all of these contemporary interpretations, the traditional definition of a meadow as a vast, untamed expanse untouched by human hands is adapted in a very intentional way. Gardens that are more densely planted that would occur in nature, that are arranged according to bloom schedules, or that are punctuated with occasional nonnative species for impact make the style a viable option for today’s residential and institutional spaces while honoring the original ecology.