How to Convert Your Lawn Into a Flowering Meadow
Are you ready to say goodbye to the hassles of maintaining a grassy lawn? Flowering meadows are beautiful habitats with a rich diversity of plants and animals. The adventurous gardener can replace turfgrass with a much more natural assortment of ornamental grasses and easy-to-grow flowering plants. Garden expert Liessa Bowen will share some useful tips to help you get started.
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The thought of maintaining a large grassy lawn makes me cringe. I dread the idea of spending my summer mowing, fertilizing, aerating, and the constant battle against the weeds. Fortunately, there’s a great alternative to a grassy lawn: gardening!
There are many highly diverse landscaping ideas that you can use to replace part or all of your grassy lawn. You can start a vegetable garden, install a series of raised beds, or plan a rock garden, to name just a few. If you’re in the mood for flowers, you can dedicate part of your yard to a butterfly garden or perennial garden or plant colorful annuals each summer.
But what if you want to convert a larger part of your lawn – or your entire grassy lawn – to a low-maintenance wildflower garden? Try planting your own flowering meadow! It can include a wide assortment of grasses and native wildflowers, as well as a variety of annuals and other perennial flowers. Unlike a turfgrass lawn, a blooming meadow will look natural and appealing and attract a multitude of pollinators to your yard.
If you’re ready to say goodbye to your grassy lawn and say hello to a beautiful and sustainable flowering landscape, let’s dig right in and discuss some useful details on this process!
Say Goodbye to Turfgrass
When you convert a lawn into a flowering meadow, you will first need to remove the lawn. This can feel like a daunting task, but it is possible. There are a few different ways you can go about this process of removing the grass. Different methods may make more sense with smaller areas vs. larger areas, depending on the current conditions of your yard. You’ll need to choose the method that will work best for you.
Remove
The most direct way to remove your grass is to dig it out using a flat spade or sod cutter. This is a lot of work initially, but it gets the job done! Directly removing grass with a shovel or sod cutter is a great option for small plots or if you are working only in small areas at a time.
Cover
Kill small patches of grass by covering them with a cover such as black plastic, a tarp, or large, overlapping sheets of cardboard. This method doesn’t require any herbicides but does require patience. It can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to thoroughly kill vegetation by smothering it with a cover. This process works the quickest during the hot summer months.
Tiller
If you have access to a tiller, this can be a very useful tool for working larger areas of your yard. A tiller will churn up the soil and allow many dormant weed seeds to grow so you still may want to combine tilling with another grass-killing method for the most effective effort.
Chemicals
While I don’t advocate spraying unnecessary chemicals around your home, herbicides can be an effective way to remove both grass and weeds. Once you kill the grass and weeds, you’ll still need to remove them before planting with flowering species. Keep in mind that herbicides only kill the living plants; they won’t prevent dormant weed seeds from sprouting.
NOTE: Before you do any digging or tilling, check the following:
- Call 811 and request all of your utility lines marked.
- If you live within a homeowner’s association, make sure your garden project is permitted.
- If you have an irrigation system, make sure you know where the pipes and sprinkler heads are so you can work around them.
Why Grow a Meadow?
There are plenty of great reasons to consider converting your lawn into a meadow. A lush green turfgrass lawn may be the most traditional front yard, but it doesn’t provide any value to animals such as pollinators. A monoculture of turfgrass is essentially a biological desert with no species diversity, no native plants, and generally poor soil quality.
A flowering meadow, on the other hand, is a biological wonderland, full of color and diversity and rich in a variety of life. These spaces support pollinators, provide habitat for birds, and are, without a doubt, much more interesting to look at than a monotonous plot of grass. Wildflowers are colorful and alive, with many different plants that bloom throughout the seasons to keep your landscape interesting all year round.
Prepare Your Site
Before you start planting anything, you’ll need to assess your site to determine what conditions you have. Once you know your specific site conditions, you can select the best plants to thrive in your new meadow.
Sun
Most wildflowers love plenty of sunlight. Choose a sunny location, ideally with six to eight hours of sunlight, although small patches of afternoon shade are also okay.
Water
All plants need water, but they all have very different watering requirements. If you have dry soil or live in a fairly dry location, choose an assortment of drought-tolerant plants. If, on the other hand, your land has some low spots that collect and hold soil moisture, plant moisture-loving plants in these areas. Ideally, the plants you choose will be well-adapted to the conditions present in your yard, and once your plants are established, you’ll never need to worry about supplemental watering!
Variety
Meadows thrive on diversity. Plant a variety of different flowers and grasses, and you will create a mini ecosystem that is both resilient and beautiful.
Plan Ahead
Before you start tossing wildflower seeds into your grass, you’ll need to do some advance preparation. Realistically, converting your lawn into a meadow is not a quick project and will require some significant time for the initial preparation.
Set a realistic timeline, and don’t expect to complete your project within a single year. If you are going to create a mini meadow in a small corner of your yard, you can easily do this within a short amount of time. If you are converting a large grassy lawn, you can expect this to be a long-term project.
Major steps in this project may include:
- Remove grass
- Prepare soil
- Sow seeds
- Transplant potted plants
- Maintain seeds and young plants until establishment
- Repeat these steps in small patches or perform once in a large area
Set a realistic budget for your project as well. Will you start plants from seeds or buy potted perennials and grasses? Are there specific tools you should rent or buy? While you probably won’t be able to complete your project entirely for free, you can also keep the costs down by doing the work yourself, growing plants from seed, and starting small.
Choose a Size
Fortunately, there is no single one-size-fits-all meadow. You can plant one corner of your yard or convert your entire lawn into a meadow garden plot. It’s really up to you to decide how much space you’d like to dedicate to this project.
Realistically, you might want to start small and work your way up to a large full-yard conversion if that’s your goal. It’s much easier to manage one small plot conversion at a time rather than attempt to manage a large project all at once. If, however, you want your meadow to reach maturity sooner, it just means more work in the first year.
If you don’t have any suitable ground to work with, there’s still hope. Try planting a pocket prairie in a raised bed! You can easily use a raised bed to grow a beautiful assortment of meadow plants as long as you have a bit of sun and enough space to install a raised bed.
Select Plants
Look for species that are low-maintenance, hardy in your climate, and have beautiful flowers or attractive foliage. You can easily use a blend of annuals, perennials, wildflowers, and grasses.
Mix a variety of flowering seasons and foliage types to ensure that your garden always has showy vegetation. Any type of prairie plant or native grass would be suitable for your meadow garden.
The following meadow-friendly plants will give you a great start to your project.
| Black-eyed Susan Rudbeckia hirta |
Black-eyed Susans are beautifully showy yellow flowers native to the central United States. These short-lived perennial wildflowers readily reseed themselves, blooming in the first year after seeding. |
| Blazing Star Liatris spp. |
Blazing stars are spectacular mid-summer blooming perennials. Several species of these wildflowers are native to the eastern United States. Butterflies and pollinators love their showy purple flower spikes. |
| Blue Grama Grass Bouteloua gracilis |
Blue grama grass is a native ornamental bunchgrass from much of central and western North America. Grow several clusters of this grass together, surrounded by wildflowers, for the perfect complement of two vegetation types. |
| Common Milkweed Asclepias syriaca |
Common milkweed is a vigorous wildflower native to eastern North America. It blooms in late spring to early summer with large spherical clusters of pale pink flowers. Common milkweed typically grows in moist habitats and is a favorite of many pollinators. It is also a larval host plant for the monarch butterfly caterpillar. |
| Cosmos Cosmos spp. |
Cosmos are an annual wildflower native to Mexico. These beautiful flowers are amazingly easy to start from seed and easily bloom in their first summer. Flower colors are typically white, pink, orange, and purple and attract plenty of pollinators. |
| Lupine Lupinus spp. |
Lupines are immensely showy wildflowers with several species native to different regions throughout North America. Lupines bloom in spring and summer and have bold spikes of colorful flowers that pollinators adore. |
| Pink Muhly Grass Muhlenbergia capillaris |
Pink muhly grass is a fabulous landscaping plant with lovely feathery pink blooms. This ornamental grass is native to the central and western United States with a spectacular fall display. |
| Purple Coneflower Echinacea purpurea |
The purple coneflower is a hardy perennial wildflower native to the central and eastern United States and Canada. It has a long blooming period and its large pinkish-purple flowers are a pollinator magnet. |
| Shasta Daisy Leucanthemum x superbum |
Shasta daisies are easy-to-grow perennials with large, showy white flowers. Blooming from late spring until mid-summer, these clumping flowers spread into larger and larger clusters and will need to be divided every few years. |
| Wild Bergamot Monarda fistulosa |
Wild bergamot is a member of the mint family and has fragrant leaves and stems. This plant is native throughout most of North America and is a popular pollinator plant. The tubular pale purple flowers also attract hummingbirds. |
The easiest to manage plants will be those native to your region. Native plants are naturally well-adapted to the local environmental conditions. They will grow well, benefit birds and pollinators, and won’t require much special attention.
You may also want to think about how different-sized plants will look together. If you use a seed mix, the plants included will likely be similar in height, but you have less control over the species included in the mix. When sprinkling seeds, try to use an assortment of plants of roughly the same height range. If you transplant a variety of potted species, place shorter plants in the front and around the edges and taller species in the middle or rear of your plot.
Starting Your Meadow
There are a few different methods for starting your wildflower meadow. If you are starting with a very small plot, you can use either seeds or young plants. If you are converting a large yard, I’d recommend starting from seed. You’ll be able to efficiently cover a lot more ground starting with seeds than trying to hand plant individual flowers and grasses.
From seed
Seeds are economical and easy to work with, and you can find an immense variety for different grasses and flowering plants. Direct sow perennial seeds in late fall and allow them to overwinter. The seeds will germinate when the weather warms the following spring. Sow annuals and seed mixes in early spring and water them regularly until they germinate.
From transplants
If you’d prefer to visit a nursery and buy potted plants, your garden will get a huge head start (compared with starting from seed), but you will have a much more limited variety to choose from, and you’ll spend a lot more money. Plan your transplanting for a spring or fall day and thoroughly water your new transplants to help reduce shock.
Maintenance
Watering
Choose a wide assortment of plants that naturally grow well in your soil type and, once your meadow is established, you will never need to water it again! It is necessary to water during establishment to help your new plants get situated in their new location.
Fertilizing
One of the major benefits of growing this type of garden is that you won’t need to fertilize. Your meadow plants will do just fine without ever needing extra fertilizers, just like they do in their natural habitats. This is especially true with native plants.
Pesticides
A diverse planting often eliminates the need for pesticides. Your meadow will naturally entice plenty of beneficial insects to visit and feast on any invading pests. Plus, using pesticides will harm beneficial insects, so it’s best to enjoy your garden without ever spraying chemicals on it.
Mowing
Turfgrass needs regular mowing to look great. A meadow does not. In fact, you won’t need to mow at all during the growing season. At the end of the season, after the plants die back for the winter, you can mow to a height of 4 to 8 inches.
Allow the bristly ends to stand during the winter, but you might want to rake and remove the taller cut stems so they don’t smother next year’s growth.
Weeding
Okay, a meadow is pretty low-maintenance, but you will definitely want to keep weeding it. Learn to identify the most common weeds, such as dock, thistle, and pokeweed. Pull these weeds before they set seed so you can keep their numbers low. Once your plants are well established, they’ll grow quite thick and help crowd out many types of weeds.
Thinning
Every few years, you may want to thin out some of the more vigorous species of plants. This is especially true for smaller plots where one or two species could easily dominate.
If you find that your patch of a particular wildflower, for example, has grown and spread beyond where you want it, it’s time to do some thinning. Simply dig and remove any densely crowded or overgrown patches to help renew their vigor and prevent them from crowding out their neighbors.
Final Thoughts
If you’re tired of trying to keep your lawn lush, green, and weed-free, maybe it’s time to consider some other options. You won’t need to give up your dream of having a beautiful yard but it might look different than you first thought.
Converting your grassy lawn into a dynamic flowering meadow is a project that will give an entirely different and lively feel to your landscape. From a monoculture of mown grass to a thriving garden of native flowers and ornamental grasses, you will add beauty and diversity while creating a space that’s surprisingly low-maintenance and wonderfully beneficial for the environment.
