A meadow garden inverts our common sense of gardening. Instead of cleaning up and simplifying an area, the meadow garden deliberately mimics nature. Instead of arranging plants in grids and rows, the meadow lets them escape and spread. The meadow garden focuses on texture and movement, and is encouraged to change throughout the seasons or the years.
A typical yard has rows or patches of flowers and shrubs around its centerpiece, the lawn. In the meadow garden, it’s the walkways and hardscape that provide structure—as a winding path of cobblestones, a rectangular strip of crushed granite, or a patio. The designer is invited to envision, first, the most appealing way to move through the space. You think about where you’d like to stop or sit, where you’d like to create a focal point, where you want to place a birdhouse or some boulders. The plants cover the remaining area—they are the negative space. In that sense, instead of focusing on the appearance of a garden, a meadow garden focuses on how you will spend time there.
Of course a meadow garden offers many practical rewards as well. Once established it’s very low-maintenance—spreading, rhizomatous or reseeding plants crowd out weeds. Dead stems and flowers provide interesting shapes through the winter so you don’t need to constantly cut things back. The garden provides food for birds and wildlife, hosts a variety of native plants, can be made to require less irrigation, and mulches itself with its falling leaves and stems, gradually improving soil. That might be why this is an increasingly popular garden style for both high-budget public gardens and cost-conscious home gardeners alike.
What is a meadow garden?
Although there is no explicit definition of a meadow garden, meadow gardens typically have the following attributes:
- Usually covers a larger area than a border garden
- Grows in full sun to part sun
- Can be installed with small plants (plugs) and seed, saving costs
- Makes use of natural rainfall with low to moderate supplemental water
- Emphasizes grasses, artemisias and textural plants rather than blooming flowers alone
- Is structured around grassland perennials, plus some annuals that self-seed on their own
- Tolerates dead flowers, cones and seed pods for visual interests rather than clearing them immediately—a true four-seasons garden
- Includes plants that are native to the region
- Considers the plants’ usefulness to birds, wildlife and pollinators
- Incorporates spreading plants that spread into each other rather than leaving gaps
Creating a meadow garden
Since meadow gardens tend to cover a large area, there are both benefits and challenges. One benefit is that it is more affordable to fill a large space with rapidly-spreading perennials than to do so with slow-growing specimen plants. On the other hand, meadow gardens defy the familiar residential yard structure and require well-placed paths and boundaries to contrast the chaotic nature of the planting beds. Figuring out how to design them well and prepare such a large space for planting can be intimidating.
Planning/designing the garden
Start planning a meadow garden by identifying inhabitable spaces within the garden’s boundaries. If you’d like to include a sitting area, water feature, designated spot for bird feeders, a gazebo or deck, designate those spaces first. Your vision for large shrubs and trees should also come before garden beds. Plant structure and growth in full shade are vastly different and fall under the category of a woodland garden rather than meadow.
First step: The borders of the meadow garden are ascertained (in this case the whole yard) and the flagstone patio, seating and fire pit are planned. A winding path is drawn. Solid dark dots represent sprinkler heads in a sprinkler irrigation system. 
The first order of plants—the tallest flowers and grasses—are designated first. They fill mostly central areas. In most cases, tall plants won’t be close to sprinkler heads where they can block irrigation to other plants. 
After the largest plants are mapped, shorter plants and spreading plants are plotted, careful to place contrasting shapes and textures side by side.
After you’ve identified your garden’s access points, such as patios or benches, sketch out the walkways between them. Paths can curve, cross or meander, depending on your preference. Straight, square-edged concrete walkways can make an attractive contrast against the billowing drifts of plants, but a crushed stone path that follows a winding arc with flowers and grass spilling over the edge can be beautiful too. It’s also wise to create some narrower, lower-order walkways to divide up large planting beds, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. The secondary paths help you move through the garden without trampling plants, and allow you to enjoy them from different vantage points.
Then, it’s time to figure out the plan for plants. Start by plotting zones for tall, medium and short plants. Site taller plants in the center of planting beds, away from walkways, while shorter plants will line the walkways. Be mindful of views you want to preserve or eyesores you want to screen from various vantage points. Also be mindful of sprinklers: if you have an automatic irrigation system, avoid blocking spray nozzles with tall plants.
Think of flower colors and textures you want to design with. I think it’s best to pick two to three core flower colors per blooming season in a section of the garden and select plants that blooming with various shades of those colors. A few off-theme accent plants can be OK, but sticking to a core color palette will create a much more harmonious and professional look. Arrange large swaths or drifts of many plants of the same species, scaled to the overall garden size. (Enormous gardens may have swaths of tens to hundreds of plants of the same species together, while smallish gardens might only have room for clusters of 2-3 plants). Try to put contrasting textures near each other: grasses next to broad-leafed plants and flowers, plants with sprays of small flowers near plants with large flowers, and plants with silver or purplish leaves beside plants with unremarkable green foliage, and so forth. Consider repeating patterns, with the same species appearing in drifts or clusters in multiple places in the garden rather than a single section for each type of plant.
Clearing the space
What’s the best way to eradicate weeds or lawns to begin planting a garden? Do you need herbicide? Do you need to solarize?Should you till everything up to prepare the soil? I find that less intervention is often quicker and more reasonable: simply covering lawns and weedy areas with a 1/2 to 1-inch layer of compost and then few more inches of cheap, bulk wood chip mulch can smother the grass and create a fertile expanse for a meadow garden to go in.
If mulching is generally good for gardens, why does covering a lawn or weeds with soil and wood chips kill it?
Simply covering unwanted plants with wood chip mulch can be a surprisingly effective way to weaken and kill them. (Woody shrubs, bindweed, quackgrass, Canada thistle and invasive groundcovers like vinca may be an exception.) Don’t chop the stems off, simply trample them down and cover. Although dormant plants can push spring shoots through mulch and soil to reach sunlight, unwanted plants buried intact during their vegetative phase are often unable to do this. Generating new shoots is a hormonally-driven process in plants—it occurs when there is a loss or absence of existing stems and foliage. Since the weeds and lawn grass still has its vegetation under the mulch—making hormones that signal that the plant still has stems and doesn’t need to create new shoots—weeds wait for daylight that doesn’t come, and exhaust stored energy trying to grow more leaves under the covering.
In most cases, some bits of growth will manage to reach the surface, but they will be weakened, easy to pluck or cover again to deplete them further. Desired plants, on the other hand, have been taking advantage of the fertile season and are prepared to shade and out-compete residual weeds. Occasional light weeding, when vigorous garden plants are becoming established, is enough to tip the balance of power away from weeds and eradicate the majority of them.
Trails and paths made of crushed stone or sand and flagstone can go right over the weeds and turf as well. (For flagstone or flat pavers, it is better to mow the weeds close to the ground so that the stones don’t shift as the smothered plants decay.)
Just be sure to plant new plants directly in the native soil rather than the pure compost, which will burn tender roots. After a season or two, the compost will break down and merge with the underlying soil.
A note on tilling
Tilling is a popular way to clear a garden plot for planting and many guides recommend it as a way to clear beds and “soften” soil for roots. I dispute that. The most aggressive resprouting weeds will return from roots. Soil with existing grass, weeds or other plants is going to be full of beneficial channels where roots have grown and died, worms and burrowing insects have cleared tunnels, and microscopic fungi have built soft fibrous bands of tissue to move water and nutrients around. The existing porosity will allow water to quickly soak into the soil, and new plants’ roots will follow the channels left by old roots to grow deeper more quickly than in compacted soil.
Tilling tends to collapse the soil’s structure. When tilled soil gets wetted again, it becomes muddy and dense. Beyond that, tilling is extra work!
When I plant a small plant or plug, I’ll break up the soil a few inches around the planting hole to remove existing weed roots and make sure soil fines are able to dissolve and settle around the new plant’s roots, but I do not till a broad area. Similarly, when planting seeds, I disrupt the top inch or so of soil to clear competing plants, but don’t go any deeper than that.
Planting the garden
A garden doesn’t need to be complete all at once—they take time to mature, and you may be discovering new types of plants you’d like to add in for years to come. But the first plants to install are your big, fast-growing, spreading and reseeding plants, because they will help fill the space, out-compete new or remaining weeds that sprout and give you an immediate reward. You might also be comfortable with letting an aggressive plant, such as lamb’s ear, yarrow or milkweed, spread widely at first, and eventually clear patches of it add new types of plants.
Using the same process I used to divide a single Salvia plant into many new plants, I added many other drifts of small plants by splitting up larger plants that had been planted in a nearby garden 1 year earlier. That included fernleaf yarrow (one plant made 15), Stella d’Oro daylilly (one clump made dozens of small clusters around the path edges), lamb’s ear (one clump made a dozen), Rocky Mountain Penstemon (one plant made 15), variegated maidenhair grass (a portion of an old clump made 7), indiangrass (1 clump made 5), little bluestem grass (1 clump made 5), Artemesia ludoviciana (as basal stem cuttings from several plants) and bearded iris (several nearby clusters were divided). There are also 5 nursery-purchased butterfly weed plants, 1 nursery-purchased false indigo, and 3 nursery-purchased anise hyssop. The pink daylilies, Russian sage and foxtail lily seen here going to seed were already established here.
Because of the cost-savings of using very small divisions of fast-growing plants, the total installation costs included less than $200 of raw materials and new plants. Although existing plants to propagate aren’t often available, the small starts can be seen as the equivalent of using very small plants or plugs from a nursery. Summer 2020.
Fast-growing, tall/large meadow garden plants include:
- Large ornamental bunchgrasses such as maiden hair grass (Miscanthus), indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans), big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), switchgrass (panicum), feather reed grass (Calamagrostis varieties), giant sacaton (Sporobolus wrightii), pink hair grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) and ravennagrass (Saccharum ravennae). Some of these get very large so be sure to read the description.
- Fernleaf yarrow (Achillea filipendulina)
- Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia)
- Maximillian’s sunflower (Helianthus maximilanii)
- Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ (Artemisia hybrid)
- Showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa)
- Goldenrod (Solidago)
- Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum)
- False indigo (Baptisia australis)
Additionally, a meadow garden needs variations in height with many shorter species as well. Often, the best medium-sized perennials are those that will spread, multiply and/or reseed.
Second-order plants to quickly fill a meadow garden:
- Medium-sized ornamental grasses including fountaingrass (Pennesitum), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), blue grama grass ‘Blonde Ambition’ (Bouteloua gracillis), as well as spreading or running grasses such as blue lyme grass (Leymus arenarius) or ribbon grass (Phelarus arundinacea). Be cautious with the spreading grasses, some may overtake non-aggressive plants.
- Prairie sage (Artemesia ludoviciana)
- Yarrow (Achillea milefolium)
- Meadow sage (Salvia nemorosa)
- Rocky mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus)
- Lupines (various species, Lupinus)
- Lamb’s ear (Stachy’s byzantium)
- Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa)
- Jupiter’s beard (Ceranthus ruber)
- Bearded iris (Iris germanica)
- Siberian iris (Iris siberica)
- Black-eyed Susan (Rudbekia hirta)
- Purple coneflower (Ecinacea sp)
- Globe thistle (Echinops rito)
Another way to quickly conquer space in a new meadow garden is by scattering seed around the perennial starts. Some commercialized “wildflower garden” seed mixes contain a wide range of annuals and perennials to fill a garden. I tend to avoid blends because I like to be more intentional around plant placement and develop drifts of the same species.
My favorite starter seed types to spread in the garden:
- Blue grama grass (Boudeloua gracilis)
- California poppy (Eschscholzia californica)
- Sunflower (Helianthus annum) — the regular wild kind. I often use plain bird seed! It’s cheap in bulk, and the plants are drought-tolerant and multi-flowered, grow quickly in any soil and attract birds.
- Blanket flower (Gallardia) — this is a short-lived perennial but often blooms the first year
- Penstemon species — if the garden is dry or non-mulched, they should have a good establishment rate. In thick mulch they may not.
- Prairie coneflower (Ratibida pinnata)
Finally, when the core garden plants are in place, you can add dimension and detail to the garden by introducing a few non-spreading accent plants that hold their own against their aggressive neighbors. Some of them are tall spires that break through the surrounding plants. Some start growing early in the spring to avoid competition. The rest line the garden’s edges and paths, where bright sun reaches lower levels.
Some of the showier, non-spreading meadow garden companions include:
- Blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens)
- Various non-creeping Sedums, although some groundcover sedums can fill gaps as well
- Blue fescue (Festuca glauca)
- Daylillies (Hemerocalis)
- Foxtail lily (Eremurus)
- Prairie blazing star (Liatris spicata)
- Fall-planted bulbs, particularly Alliums: Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ (Allium aflateunense), Allium ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘Drumstick’ Allium (Allium sphaerocephalon), species tulips, particularly Tulipa clusiana and Tulipa bakeri.
Maintaining the garden
Few garden plans are so perfect from the get-go that you don’t need any tweaks. You may find a species doesn’t fill in the way you’d like, or that you’d like to expand the color palette. Plan on adding a few more plants here and there as time goes by. You might even choose to toss in a few handfulls of seed. A caution: when over-seeding a garden, I favor adding single species in a section at a time. Although this garden style allows plants to mingle, too many different species growing in the same patch can cause detract from the desirable contrasts found in larger drifts.
Ultimately, meadow gardens can be very low-maintenance. Weeds have a hard time finding an opening among densely-packed, tough established perennials and grasses. Dead flowers set seed that feeds birds and adds winter interest. Insects and animals move in, enjoying the shelter and food source and keeping each other in check. Pest insects are unlikely to become a nuisance when plant varieties are very diverse and predatory insects are always present. All you have to do is sit back and watch, or do as much or as little as you’d like.
When to trim back
One popular approach to meadow gardening is to cut dead stems down in late winter, just before green shoots emerge. I leave the downed material in place as mulch. Spring rain and snow will quickly soften and compress it as it is covered by new green growth. Earthworms tug the dead leaves into the soil so they soften and partially decay, at which point they become the worms’ food. You can choose to spot-trim things that bother you or become overgrown, and gently nudge your plants with selective thinning. When a competing plant is ready to grow into the void, the plant you are trying to reduce will stay in check long term. But like always in a meadow garden this work always optional.
Whatever you choose, the basic perspective I employ in meadow gardening is that it’s always much less work than spraying, mowing and aerating a lawn, or reseeding dead patches and managing insect pests. And the meadow garden, with vibrant colors and textures and a host of animal guests, is a lot more fun to watch and explore as time goes on.