A successful wildflower meadow (where it's always failed before)

06/16/2011
A successful wildflower meadow (where it's always failed before)

Ever since Meadow in a Can, our gardeners' imaginations have been enchanted by the idea of tall grasses spangled with wildflowers.  We've dreamt of butterflies dancing over our private fields of flowers, and of putting the lawn mower in the next neighborhood garage sale--and never replacing it.

If it seemed too good to be true, that's because it was.  For most of us, living in temperate regions with moderate rainfall (most of the eastern half of the U.S. and a good part of the West as well), a flowering meadow consisting of annuals such as bachelor's buttons and shirley poppies is condemned to remain forever a dream--unless we are willing to cultivate that meadow exactly like a garden.  Which of course we're not; the very idea of Meadow in a Can is that you plant it and forget it.

I was probably more seduced than just about anyone by the idea of a wildflower meadow.  Those of you who regularly read these pages know the special place wildflowers hold in my heart. ( I've written about them so much you're probably sick of hearing about them.)  And as anyone who has seen a natural wildflower meadow in full bloom can attest, it's like witnessing a bit of paradise on earth. 

I'd tried various approaches to the meadow dream back when I was living in Indiana, and none of them worked.  The only possible plan in that climate seemed to plant a veritable true prairie, starting from scratch by cultivating bare ground and planting many, many small plants using a mix of locally adapted native perennials and grasses.

I watched the installation of various such prairies, as well as their evolution.  While some of them did reasonably well, many of them fell victim to invasive weed species, driving the owners to eventually give up and go back to traditional lawns.  In additiion, as a nursery and landscape professional, I knew that these installations were extremely costly.

When I arrived in France and Denis showed me the orchard in Normandie, he told me he'd like to plant wildflowers among its grasses.  It sounded like a lovely idea, but Normandie has some of the fastest growing, densest grass in the world, due to its soil type and plentiful rainfall (in "normal" times).  Denis said he had bought a wildflower seed mix and had scattered it among the fruit trees.  (Inwardly I smirked at his innocence.)  Only a single seed had germinated, he said, pointing out a spindly blue lupine plant.

So Denis had scattered a wildflower seed mix over the world's densest grass, and only one lupine seed had germinated.  Just hold that thought, because it is key to this whole article.

The problem with most wildflower seed mixes is that they rely heavily on what in French are called messicole species.  These are annual plants that are adapted to sprouting in disrupted (e.g. cultivated) open ground.  That's why in Europe, in the days before herbicides, wheat fields were always full of poppies and bachelor's buttons (or "cornflowers", so called because they were always found growing in grain fields).  Today in France, the bachelor's button is becoming increasingly rare. 

Wildflower meadows based on these species can have some success in arid areas where lack of rainfall keeps the natural vegetation from encroaching too much and grasses are minimal and sparser than in higher rainfall areas.  But if you live in a typical temperate climate, you can't make this sort of meadow work unless you cultivate it each year.

When Denis suggested wildflowers for the orchard, I was all for it.  I still hadn't totally figured out the wildflower meadow thing, and besides, I was now in France.  Wasn't that where the poppies grow?  So I removed the grass (a huge job) from several irregularly shaped islands in the orchard and we planted various annual wildflower species.  The results were lovely--for that first year.  The second year, there was a smattering of phacelia and poppies, and the third year, there remained practically no trace of our efforts.  Like jungle vines engulfing ruins, the lusty grass had totally erased our wildflower beds.

But wait!  Meanwhile, that single spindly lupine plant had morphed into a colony of about 25!  And as the plants were perennial, their increase was geometric.  I had to laugh at myself.  All that work for nothing, while Denis magically managed to sow a nascent wildflower meadow from a single seed without even bending his back.   Wasn't that something like the one-straw revolution?

Over the years since then, I have been able to transform the orchard into a flowering meadow.  And I've done it using two techniques:  1) I've observed which wildflower species are able to thrive in surrounding grassy fields and pastures; and 2) I've transplanted everything too agressive for our big perennial border into the orchard meadow.

All of us have had the experience of discovering to our horror that what we thought would be a well-behaved perennial turning out to be a garden bully.  Most typically, these plants have vigorous stolons (underground stems) that enable them to travel underground and sprout up all over the place.  While this habit is unsuited to the mixed border, it is perfect for the would-be wildflower meadow in relatively rainy climes. 

But, just one word of caution.  Some aggressive plants may be classified as invasive exotics in your region.  Always make sure you plant none of those.  You wouldn't want to be responsible for an exotic plant invasion in a natural area or someone else's yard when your garden bully blithely skips the border of your property. 

One plant that I enjoy in our orchard but which is emphatically an exotic invasive in the U.S. is Polygonum polymorpha.  Normally, I have a horror of everything in this genus of plants, expressly because they are so invasive.  But one autumn at the Courson garden festival, I saw several nurseries selling pots of a polygonum with cloudy plumes of white flowers that smelled heavenly--like honey.  I've always had a weakness for autumn-flowering plants as they constitute the 'last gasp' of the garden before winter.  I bought the plant from a nurseryman who cautioned me the plant would spread, so I planted it in the orchard.  Now we have big swathes of honey-scented blossoms in fall.  Despite their fragile appearance, the flowers dry to perfection.  And the plant's foliage turns a luminous yellow while it is still blooming.  But believe me, I wouldn't want to have this plant in a border situation. 

Another perennial, which is actually native to the U.S. as well, that has managed to gain a toehold against the grasses is fireweed, or Epilobium angustifolia.  While this plant is a nightmare in the mixed border, in the meadow, its spikes of pink flowers are lovely.  Caution:  this plant spreads by stolons and by floating seeds.

Choosing appropriately aggressive plants to embellish your grassy meadow is a highly individual process.  Suitability depends on your soil type and climate.  A case in point:  Aster nova-angliae, that stalwart American wild aster, was an absolute nightmare in my Normandie mixed border and has been banished to the orchard.  There, each roughly planted division has morphed into a gigantic island of solid asters.  (I'll try to remember to post photos of this this fall.)  Who could have imagined that this plant, rhizomatous yes, but relatively well-behaved in its native habitat, would turn into a monster in France?  (This is the quintessence of the 'invasive exotic' phenomenon.)  You could say that the orchard serves as a sort of 'prison farm' for this delinquent.  But its oceans of fall blossoms attract literally droves of butterflies for sumptuous 'last suppers' before the arrival of winter.

Another stoloniferous plant that is well-adapted to grassy meadows is common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris).  This plant's rhizomes are threadlike but mighty, infiltrating even the thickest grass.  Spikes of clear yellow blossoms grace it in midsummer.

And of course, don't forget the common oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare).  Perfectly adapted to temperate meadows, it provides graceful drifts of white daisies in early summer.  Shouldn't your children experience the simple pleasure of making daisy chains?

While so far I've talked about plants that can bully their way through the grass in a rainy-land meadow,  some plants use different adaptive mechanisms to survive in a grassy environment.  Lupine is an excellent example.  Lupinus perennis has a large seed that germinates successfully in the thick thatch of grassy meadows.  The seedling then sends down a powerful taproot through the fibrous roots of the grass.  This is apprently a great strategy, as Denis' one-flower revolution attests.  Today we have a veritable forest of blue lupins blooming in the orchard every June.

The pink blossoms above belong to Silene dioica, a French native known here as 'the red companion.'  How this plant manages to thrive in grassy meadows baffles me, but thrive it does, creating slowly-enlarging colonies without any intervention whatsoever.  It produces masses of starry, bright pink blossoms from early May through the mid-June (these are global warming era dates) that make lovely cutflowers. 

Another lovely meadow perennial that has survived in our orchard after being planted from seed early on is the meadow geranium (Geranium pratense).  Its graceful blossoms are very similar to that of the garden variety 'Johnson's Blue,' but are more blue and less violet than that cultivar.  This plant has very fine seed, but a rather strong fleshy taproot, which must be what allows it to survive among the grasses.  It's easy to start from seed.

Another denizen of grassy meadows whose strategy of germination at least baffles me is dame's rocket (Hesperis matronalis).  What's more, being a biennial, this plant has to struggle with replanting itself among the grasses every year.  And yet it succeeds.  In our orchard, it increases gently every year.  You can see its luminous white blossoms next to the lupines in the main photo at the top of the article.  They are fabulous cut, and as if this were not enough, sweetly fragrant in the evening and at night.  Charmingly, they are night-fragrant even in the vase!

After 10 years of observing nature and trial and error in the garden, I at long last have my wildflower meadow in rainy Normandie.  How did I succeed?  Planting poppies and other annuals in a grassy, rainy environment is a flash in the pan, because it's not natural.  I succeeded by working with the grasses, and not against them.  Try some of the specially adapted plants I've mentioned here, or develop your own list by entering into your own process of observation.  Once you learn the dynamics of your grassy meadow, you'll have your own bit of paradise, spangled with blossoms from spring through fall!

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