For many gardeners, the idea of a flower meadow, with nodding blooms gently waving in the breeze, is high on the wish list. In a flower meadow, we loosen the typical constraints about spacing, organization, and orderly rows. It’s more wild and free, but still curated and designed. Blooms are plentiful, and songbirds sing. 

But before your flower meadow is ready for you to spend an afternoon relaxing with a cup of tea, you’ll need to plan, prepare, and plant it. Proper site prep and plant selection will go a long way toward minimizing the care required afterward.

Planning a Flower Meadow

The fun part of designing a flower meadow is that you get to decide what your flower meadow will look like. You choose the species and varieties, and therefore the color palette, bloom shape, and plant height. The key is to add flowers you like, ensure something is always in bloom, and match the flowers and grasses to your site’s climate, soil, and sunshine.

When planning a flower meadow, inventory your site and evaluate not only the amount of sunlight it receives, but also its drainage and soil type. Is it a low spot that stays a bit wetter, or is it sandy and prone to being dry? If planting perennials, you’ll also need to take into account your USDA plant hardiness zone. You can check your zone here. 

As we mentioned in our post about alternatives to a traditional lawn, a flower meadow doesn’t have to stretch from property line to property line. It’s actually better to start with a more manageable patch. A 100-square-foot spot (a spot 10’x10’ or 8’x12’) is a good starting point and can be prepared and tended with the hand tools you already have and a few dollars' worth of seed.

Site Preparation for a Flower Meadow

Site preparation is normally the biggest challenge, and perhaps the biggest cause of failure (read as a giant patch of ugly weeds instead of flowers) when creating a flower meadow. Most of us are selecting a patch of lawn and transforming it into a meadow, not starting with bare ground, which raises the question: What to do about the sod?

The short answer is that the existing turfgrass will need to be killed. The grasses we typically have in our yards are tough, resilient, and spread easily by rhizomes, making them persistent and hard to get rid of. Site preparation is a lengthy topic, but for simplicity, we’ll discuss two methods below.

With (Nearly) Unlimited time

If you aren’t in a rush, then site prep becomes easier. The process below takes several months, but it is very effective.

• Mow the existing grass and weeds as short as your mower will go. Scalp it right down like a golf course green. This not only chops up a bunch of grass for future decay, but also stresses the grass plants.

• Wait a week for the new grass sprouts to emerge. The turf grasses will spend energy pushing up new shoots, further weakening them. After a week, cover the area with something to block all light. Heavy tarps, large pieces of cardboard, or other similar materials work well. You may need to double up tarps to ensure zero light gets through. Weigh down the edges.

• Check the grass to see if it's dead. Not yellow, but dead brown. Depending on the time of year and the temperatures, it can take as little as 3 weeks or as long as a couple of months. When the grass is dead, roll back the tarp.

• Spread a layer of compost an inch deep right over the dead grass. You’ll increase drainage in heavy soils, improve water and nutrient holding capacity in poor soils, add soil organic matter, and provide a better home for soil microorganisms. Many flowers will grow in average or even poor soil, so a light layer of compost to improve structure is plenty.

• After applying the compost, till it into the soil. Normally, I don’t recommend tilling, but in the case of breaking a new bed from an old yard, it’s okay to make an exception. Our yards are often super-compacted from years of foot traffic and riding lawnmowers. While tilling increases compaction in well-structured soils, it can be beneficial in breaking the rock-like consistency of the average backyard to make a suitable seedbed. 

• Wait about ten days after tilling for the new weeds to germinate. Once they start to pop up, cover everything with the tarp again, smothering them. This round should only take a few weeks. Letting the weeds from the weed seed bank germinate and then killing them off will greatly reduce problems in the future.

When the second round of smothering is complete, roll back the tarp, and you’ll have a fertile seedbed ready for planting. The now-loosened soil surface will provide better seed-to-soil contact, allow the seed to settle in and be less exposed to wind and birds, and prevent the seed from washing away in a rainstorm.

The Weekend Project Timeline

The above method is great, but if you aren’t that patient, here’s a quicker way. It’s more labor-intensive, but much faster, although you’ll likely have more weed pressure. Some steps are the same, but we’ll use labor and machinery to speed up the process.

• Mow the area as short as possible, like in the above method. 

• Rent or buy a sod cutter. Manual tools work fine for small areas. Rent the gas-powered machine if you are working in a larger area. Remove all the sod and use it to fill in low spots in the yard, or pile it up to decompose.

• Add a two-inch thick layer of compost. We’ll add more compost using this method to replace the organic matter lost when the sod was removed. 

• Till in the site, working in the compost and breaking up the compacted soil, the same as above. 

• Rake the bed smooth, and you are ready for planting. 

*When using this method, pay attention to the gradient, or drainage, of the land. Cutting off a two-inch-thick layer of sod creates a lower spot, which could become a pond in heavy rains. You may need to do a bit of additional shaping to ensure water moves away and doesn’t collect and drown your meadow.

Planting a Flower Meadow

This is the fun part, so don’t let it be overwhelming.  We traditionally think of a flower meadow as being mainly perennials, and native perennials at that. But gorgeous flower meadows can be planted with only annuals, planted in spring and in bloom by summertime. For those of us who are impatient, adding annuals to a traditional perennial flower meadow provides structure and color in year one, instead of waiting until the biennials and perennials are well-established 2-3 years down the road.

For a this-year flower meadow in bloom by midsummer, choose the weekend prep method above, and then start with easy annuals like zinnias, cosmos, branching sunflowers, bachelor buttons, osteospermum, cornflowers, and some annual oats for a grassy variety. Add in any other favorites you have.

For a perennial bed that will come back year after year, start with classics like rudbeckia, echinacea, coreopsis, shasta daisies, and add native wildflowers from your area. A little big bluestem or broomsedge adds vertical interest and a more natural look. Add a temporary cover crop to help minimize weeds. You may also wish to transplant a few native perennials from the local nursery. Feel free to add some annuals for first year blooms.

Mix all the seeds together in a container. When planting, you’ll distribute them evenly across the area, not in rows. A thorough mixing will ensure a more natural meadow look. An inexpensive grass seed applicator will work for most seed mixes. For small areas, you can broadcast the seeds by hand. Lightly wet the area with a hose, just dampening the soil surface. Broadcast the seeds, taking care to spread them evenly from edge to edge. 

How much seed you will need depends on the size of the flower meadow you are planting, but in general, more seed is better than less. When you are done, the soil should look heavily seasoned with seeds, but not covered by a seed layer. As a starting point, a quarter pound of seeds should cover an area of about 300 square feet, though this will vary with the size of the seeds. If you’ve seeded a bare spot in the lawn with grass seed, this is similar. 

Gently (very gently) rake or smooth the area with your hand. The seeds need good soil contact, but you don’t want to bury them deeply. Scratching up the area so the seeds are barely covered is what we’re after here. Use a large piece of cardboard or plywood to gently firm the soil surface, much as you might pat the top of the hole after planting a vegetable seed.

Care and Maintenance of Flower Meadows

After planting, water the area well. An overhead sprinkler works great for this, preventing you from creating bare spots with an errant blast of the hose.  Then it’s time to wait. If planted in spring, annuals and warm-season grasses will germinate quickly, but many perennials need a cold period to break dormancy and may not pop up or bloom until the following year. 

Some weeds will invariably show up. Walking all over your young plants to get at the weeds is counterproductive in a flower meadow, so you’ll have to put up with the ones you can’t reach from the edge for a while. As the plants all get larger, you can tiptoe in and simply cut the larger ones in half, preventing them from flowering and setting seed. In early spring, before new growth pops up, you may wish to mow the entire meadow to chop up last year’s old stems and minimize woody shrub invasions. For annual flower meadows, you’ll also want to broadcast some additional seed.

A flower meadow consisting of mostly annuals may need periodic watering in the heat of summer, but for the most part, the closeness of the plants shades the ground, and combined with the compost you added will help to keep the soil moisture higher than we are used to in a raised bed or traditional garden with exposed soil. A flower meadow of mostly native perennials will rarely need watering once established.