Hilly Meadow Gardens

The display is even more gratifying because very little site preparation goes into creating a meadow. When you seek out plants that thrive naturally in your climate and soil, the job becomes easy. After planting them once, many wildflowers multiply or reseed with no assistance on your part. You can use your saved time and energy to experiment with other flowers to add to the palette, fine-tuning your collection with each passing season.

Yard-Sized Meadows

They're somewhat wild and woolly by nature, so wildflower meadows are best located a short distance from your house, separated from it by a swath of neatly mown turf. There's other advantages to setting off your meadow with a trim lawn. It serves as an open area, allowing you to stand back and admire the view. It also acts as a buffer zone for wildlife, which are naturally drawn to wildflower meadows. A short fence also helps to set apart a wildflower area. Fences lend a sense of importance, too, making the meadow look like an intentional garden rather than a happy accident.

Start small with a wildflower meadow, and expand your space as you need more room for a growing collection of plants. Many of the flowers listed here have such strong constitutions that they seldom fail when given an opportunity to grow.

Adopting Wildflowers

Prepare the site for planting by eliminating weeds and creeping grasses. You can pull or dig out weeds, but disturbing the soil often stimulates even more weeds by breaking the roots of perennial weeds, which can sprout new plants from the pieces. So, it is usually easiest to spot-treat unwanted vegetation with an all-purpose contact herbicide like glyphosate. Leave tuft-forming grasses in place to help protect the soil from erosion. After the unwanted plants die, usually within 3 weeks, rake the open patches of ground and begin planting perennial and annual flowers, along with any additional small ornamental grasses that suit your scheme.

For fast results, start with purchased plants of colorful, flowering native perennials, such as coreopsis, gold-enrod, purple coneflower. and rudbeckia. These flowers can be started from seed, but the seedlings often take two years to reach blooming size. Meanwhile, they may be overtaken and lost in the exuberant growth of other plants in a wild/lower meadow. By contrast, container-grown nursery plants of these and other hardy perennials often bloom the first summer after being set out in early spring.

Some gardeners prefer to stick with only native plants, but you will get much more color, over a longer season, by inviting imported bulbs and annuals into your meadow. For early spring excitement, plant daffodils in large natural-looking drifts, and stud the edges of your meadow with smaller bulbs, such as crocus and grape hyacinth. The fading foliage of these and other spring-flowering bulbs will be hidden from view by perennials and annuals that appear later in the spring.

A few self-seeding annuals, notably cosmos, poppies, and larkspur, are often used as leading color plants in a wildflower meadow. Although these annuals do shed seed by the millions, much of it is eaten by birds or carried away by rain. So, to make sure you have all the color you desire, it is usually best to sow at least a few new packets seed each year. Experiment with other informal annuals that can be grown from seed, such as rose campion, but do not try to add hybrid annuals normally used for formal beds and borders, such as petunias and begonias, to a wildflower meadow. Their large, bold flowers often look out of place among the delicate wild flowers, and they rarely reseed with success.

Mowing Your Meadow

In the interest of neatness, and to control tree seedlings and other woody weeds that inevitably pop up, a meadow should be mowed at least once a year, preferably in late fall. This job may be too rough for a mower, but it is easily tackled by a gas-powered weed trimmer equipped with a blade. Allow the debris to lie on the ground through winter as a mulch. Seeds may germinate under its protection, and it will prevent soil erosion. In early spring, rake open patches, loosen the top 1/2 in (I cm) of soil with a hoe, and plant seeds of annuals like poppies, cosmos, and larkspur.