'Meadowscaping': The people turning their lawns into wild meadows
'Meadowscaping': The people turning their lawns into wild meadows
Turning lawns into meadows can have big benefits for people, wildlife and the climate. Here's why 'meadowscaping' has become the latest gardening craze.
When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in Pennsylvania, they knew they didn't want a perfectly manicured front lawn like their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf – a flourishing, wild meadow home to diverse species of plants and animals.
Weaner Cooper had always wanted to focus on native plants in her lawn and do less mowing, so rewilding their front lawn felt like the right move. But the Coopers' lawn is a different animal than her father's. It's in full Sun and consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass – narrow-leaved grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow could fully take over.
Rather than rip everything up and live with a drab, brown lawn for months, they decided to try strategically seeding and planting native plants into the existing turf, hoping it would eventually weed the turf out naturally. "It's easier in the sense that you don't need to be beating back as many weeds," explains Weaner Cooper. "The native plants came in so thickly that they outcompeted a lot of the weed pressure that would have been there if we would have just made it brown."
It took about two years, lots of planning, some careful weeding, and some trial and error, but eventually a medley of waist-high native plant species blanketed their vast front lawn.
The only concern I’d have is ticks. Is there a way to get rid of them without going crazy with bug spray or destroying the plants ?
just treat meadow bits like planted flowers, and don't walk through them?
That works for me, but try to tell that to my dogs 😂
Ticks move into lawns as well, and while I haven't found studies comparing the density of ticks in shorter grass vs. flower beds, I would assume it's a wash; even if there are less ticks in turfgrass, you're walking/lying on that grass, allowing more opportunities for them to latch onto you. Whereas you're not walking through flower beds, so even if there's a greater tick population, you're not coming into contact with them as much.
That’s fair, but dogs don’t tend to care much about not walking through flower beds 😆 So, I would probably not get ticks myself, but they probably would.
Now that is a nice looking fron yard.
Picture alone is making me sneeze.
The flowers in the image are pollinated by bugs and birds. Their pollen is not what you're sneezing at. More likely it's tree pollen or ragweed, which grows in competition with these wildflowers. Doing this might actually reduce your seasonal allergies.
There are many, many programs - sometimes as simple as a one-form rebate - available to help with and often completely cover costs related with:
- replacing grass lawns with native plants, drought resistant plants and food gardens
- adding cisterns, rain barrels and grey water systems
- replacing with or adding new "smart" sprinkler controllers that check weather forecasts to plan irrigation around the rain
- ordering and planting trees, including fruit trees
- compost barrels, compost and mulch, drip irrigation hoses, pool covers, and more
Some of my favorites include programs where you can get trees delivered and sometimes even planted for free, programs to help restore local parks and buisness landscaping to native flora, volunteer programs to remove invasive species from local parks, and money for replacing turf lawns with plants, bushes and trees that help bird and beneficial insect populations. Sometimes lanscaping companies and volunteers can even do the work utilizing the grants and rebates with little or no cost to you! Shoutout to the arbor day foundation that provides native trees, delivered to your door.
Here is a list (not just the US) of programs, and another here. Your local water utility likely has a list of rebates and such available in your area, as well as your county extension office if youre in the US, and any government office from city up to the federal level, especially if you live in a drought prone area like the southwestern US. You can also search for "xeniscaping" to find more, or talk to your local hardware store or nursery.
Partner and I got 50% of our rain barrel purchase covered by attending a small state run course on sustainable gardens. Totally worth it, and we can take it again to get assistance with other resources, like garden beds, standalone greenhouses...etc...
I'm all for growing native plants, but I worry about ticks whenever I see an article like this.
Do you also worry about the collapse of natural systems by preventing pollinators from doing their job?
It's sad that this is so funny because it's true.
No
I suppose that depends on the area but that's largely not going to be a concern. Just have paths where you need that don't require you do wade through bushes directly. If one has the space, slap a guinea hen in there they love eating ticks
Tick populations explode because tick hunting animals like porcupines and voles need tall grass to avoid being hunted themselves. And because cars run them over and cats murder them.
You probably have ticks in your yard anyway. They can make their nests in the grass.
was going to say my yard produced as many ticks when it was a regularly mowed lawn as after it was turned into "gardens" ...
I worry about chiggers and wasps with grass that high. Not to mention the townships.
Bonus: Free snakes
And free pest control!
Nice, saves money on rat poison.
Extra Spicy Bonus: Free ticks!
HOA's have entered the chat.
I think this is great. Hoping to do something similar with my yard. Why is this community so trash? Very disappointing. If you don't get the idea behind no lawns, why don't you go somewhere else. This is pointless. Also there won't be any ticks or snakes in the middle of suburbia surrounded by ecological wasteland lawns. Clueless commenters.
All for it.
Unfortunately where I live grass or plantings for a lawn above a certain height gets you a letter and possibly a citation from the town. You’d have to rip out the whole lawn and “landscape” the space. Not sure how much good that would do as you’d constantly have to maintain it so as not to leave all the dead plants around as the flowers died.
That said, one can still do a lot with lawn space to make it at least low-mow with various plants and flowers that will still look great and provide something for insects to eat.
We’ve been doing this at our local park and I have a friend who does this for a living. Native plants are amazing.
Meadowscaping is just not gardening. A more environmentally conscious idea is to grow your own vegetables, to cut down on the fossil fuel used to transport food and reduce the amount of money going to agribusiness.
Even if you don't have a garden, you can grow things like tomatoes and chillis in pots if you have a window that gets good light. Anything you can grow yourself helps.
Providing habitat for local species is environmentally conscious.
If a food crop will grow easily in your garden, it's probably also growing on local family farms.
Nothing wrong with home food gardens (as long as they don't introduce invasives or toxic runoff, which I'm sure you're careful about) but they're not necessarily superior to rewilding.
Ok where I live is essentially a town built into the wilds and every spring the wilderness threatens to reclaim the streets. The sea, however is heavily polluted from commercial shipping and tourism so cutting down on things brought in from other places is more of a burning issue for me. The local farms supply all the meat and potatoes you could ask for but, pretty much all veg is shipped in from places with longer growing seasons. The chillis I buy are grown 2000 km away for example.
Sometimes it's not about feeding yourself and about feeding the ecosystem.
Why not both?
Everyone where I live: "Nothing grows out here!"
I mean, if you tear out all the local growth and try to instead grow foreign things that aren't suited to this environment, yeah.
Anyone have a link on how to best do this? I have a sort of wild yard situation happening and it would be nice to have some practical tips on how to guide it towards a meadow and away from the current situation of weeds (both annual and perennial).
I'm worried there is no "easy" way and it's basically hand-weeding every square foot?
My yard used to be hard-packed clay where only the most tenacious weeds could survive (field bindweed, burdock, thistle, dandelion), so my first step was putting down multiple layers of heavy cardboard to smother them, then covering that with about a foot of wood chip. That killed the latter three and helped to start softening up the soil (worms move in when organic matter is present), but bindweed just pushed through the cardboard and wood chip, so I had to hit that with (selective, judicious) applications of herbicide. It was a hobby for the first year, but now my yard is weed-free and the soil is turning more rich and loamy!
I've mostly used starts/seedlings to fill in my beds, but now that the weed pressure is lower I've started putting soil & compost over the mulch to encourage my plants to self-seed. I'm also filling in all the "blank spaces" with ground cover, to provide an additional barrier against weeds. A mature garden will require a little weeding now and then, but for me that's something I enjoy (it's a break from work, and time in the sun), and it's definitely not as intensive as vegetable gardening.
I don't have a lawn... or a house...
You're saving heaps on landscaping costs! 🙌