The Allure of the Meadow Garden By Carole Ottesen

Creating a meadow garden takes patience and determination, but the results can be incredibly rewarding.
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Photo credits: American Horticultural Society.

There’s romance in a meadow. A field of pliant, swaying grasses and bright summer flowers evokes a time when the world was a younger, simpler, safer place. Global warming wasn’t happening, fish were jumping out of pristine lakes and streams, and genetically modified corn and soybeans were pure science fiction.

Along with a meadow’s aesthetic charms, the yearning for simpler times was and remains a force behind a meadow movement that came to life in the iconoclastic Sixties. Around that time, packets of mixed wildflower seeds began appearing on the market. The idea was that one had only to scatter the seeds on the waiting ground and, presto, a meadow would spring up.

We all know that is not what happened. Typically, the results were disappointing, if not disastrous. But the allure of meadows remained. With trial, error, and energy, gardeners learned how to make them. And they now know that while meadows appear to come about as gracious, spontaneous gifts of nature, appearances deceive.

More than 20 years ago, a meadow was started at River Farm, home of the American Horticultural Society in Alexandria, Virginia. Two acres that had once been a field and had subsequently become a lawn, were disc-harrowed and seeded with a suitable wildflower mix. In record time, the entire two acres produced a bumper crop of pokeweed (Phytolacca americana). Steve Davis, then horticulturist, theorized that the disc-harrowing brought to the surface pokeweed seeds that had lain dormant for 100 years. They had germinated swiftly and easily outgrew the slower-developing wildflowers. Davis learned the hard way that one of the toughest places to start a meadow is in what was once a field.

From the ground up

“It is vital that competing weeds be eliminated to allow the young seedlings to grow,” says Neil Diboll, president of Prairie Nursery, a Westfield, Wisconsin, firm that has installed meadows and prairies around the country. (For more about prairies, see “The Prairie Difference,” right.) The way to do that is to prepare the site with a regimen tailored specifically to existing conditions.

When old fields are prepared for planting by cultivation alone, “every cultivation cycle brings up new weed seeds to the soil surface where they can germinate,” explains Diboll. It may take cultivation every two to three weeks for a year or more until the weeds are gone.

Using an herbicide such as glyphosate to kill existing vegetation is tempting because the soil need not be turned, so seeds remain buried, although several applications may be needed during the season to kill weeds that arise at different times.

When a more recent attempt to start a meadow at River Farm began in 2003, glyphosate was employed to prepare the site (for more details on River Farm’s meadow and its establishment, see “How to Make a Meadow,”).

While the large size of the River Farm meadow made using glyphosate a practical choice for clearing the soil, horticulturist and author Stephanie Cohen opted for an organic method to prepare her roughly half-acre meadow site alongside her house on the outskirts of Philadelphia. She eliminated existing growth by first removing the sod and then “putting newspaper down in the fall to smother everything that might come up.”

For those uncomfortable with using chemicals to prepare the ground for meadow plants, the smother-method is simple and effective, particularly for small-scale plantings.

To keep the newspaper in place, cover it with a layer of any organic product that will decompose - chopped leaves, grass clippings, etc. To be effective, however, this method takes months.

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