Wanna create a meadow garden? Here are some tips to make it easier!
- In a small garden, keep the design simple. Choose a grass or grasses based on how you want to use a space: do you want to walk across the meadow every now and again, or do you want to use it as a lawn, or mow a path through it?
- Know your site. Start with the direction your garden faces. Study the way the sun falls on your garden: do you see microclimates that get more or fewer hours of sunlight than the rest of the garden? Look at how trees are sited: where do they cast shade and at what time of day?
- Kill your lawn ruthlessly. Constant use of chemicals in agriculture is absolutely a bad thing, but this is different. It’s a hormone that affects living green tissue, so you spray it on a plant that absorbs it and metabolizes it. That causes cell destruction and that plant dies.
- Don’t bother with soil amendment. Instead, cover your dead lawn with bark mulch and plant grasses directly into the dead sod.
- Create good bones. Members of the lily family can behave like grasses. So can liriopes or lomandras.
- Add seasonal accents. Plant spring bulbs, perennials, annuals, and flowering grasses to add successive waves of color to a meadow throughout the seasons.
- Embrace a natural look. To look like a real meadow, your garden must have movement. You’ll get movement from flowers, swaying grasses, and happy clumps of plants that have re-seeded themselves.
- Meadow maintenance. Mow pathways from four to six times a year. With other grasses, mow once or twice a season or cut back seedheads in winter.
