To Make a Meadow

by Susan Harris
Our recent discussion of meadows, especially your excellent comments, prompts this follow-up about the 5-acre meadow at the American Horticultural Society headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.  This is what it looked like last fall when I was there for the Eastern Trials (new plant introductions).  Absolutely gorgeous, and humming with life.  Even the site is awesome - a gentle slope down to the Potomac River.

Coincidentally, there's a terrific article about meadows and especially this one in the current issue of Landscape Architecture, which originally appeared in The American Gardener.  So here's the meadow's back story:

TAKE #1
The first attempt at a meadow here was 20 years ago.  What had been a field and then a lawn was cultivated and wildflower seeds applied, but the primary result was pokeweed, so much that the AHS horticulturist theorizes that 100 years' worth of seeds had been brought to light.  It turns out that for cultivation to successfully remove the existing weed seeds, it has to be done every two to three weeks for 12 to 18 months.  So, maybe this isn't a project for the low-maintenance crowd.

TAKE #2
The current meadow was begun in 2003 and this time, with horticulturist Peggy Bowers in charge.  She applied Round-up every 3 weeks or so for almost 10 months to kill all the vegetation, including seasonal weeds, before meadow planting began.

Next, 100 pounds of bluestem seed and 35,000 grass and forb plugs were planted.  (Forbs are nonwoodies other than grasses.)  All the plugs and considerable staff time were donated by  Kurt Bluemel, and the meadow is named in memory of his son Andre.    

Maintenance requirements for the first season after plugging consisted of about 20 hours a week of hand weeding and weekly watering with a sprinkler unless an inch of rain had fallen during the week.

Maintenance in subsequent years is all about the constant encroachment of invasive plants and tree seedlings, which are hand-pulled or spot-sprayed.  (Plants with the urge to invade this meadow include Ailianthus, oriental bittersweet, Lonicera japonica, Polygonum cupidatum 'japanese smart weed', Pyrus and ampelopsis.)  The other maintenance is a thorough mowing every February, with more frequent mowing of the paths.

But critters must love the results because the meadow's inhabitants and visitors include: Red fox, eastern box turtles, black racer snakes, red shouldered hawk, red tailed hawk, indigo buntings, eastern bluebirds, orchard orioles, eastern kingbird, gold finches, swallows, carolina wren, carolina chickadee, cedar waxwing, song sparrow, brown thrashers, as well as hundreds of butterflies including Fritillary, Eastern swallow tails and Painted ladies and several thousand native pollinators. 

And more meadows:

• A meadow at the National Arboretum was created by just letting a field grow and removing the woodies and invasives individually. (And your intrepid blogger will be doing a site visit to report on the results.)
• Midsummer mowing keeps the meadow short enough for the wildflowers to actually be seen, but has to be timed correctly to avoid destroying nests.
• Alternatives to Round-up are the old newspaper trick, and solarization with the use of clear plastic.
  
• Use of forb plugs rather than seeds increases the chances of success.
• Meadows are transitional stages, usually on their way to becoming forest, so no wonder they're so much work.  Prairies, on the other hand, are stable communities, mainly grassland.  So if you live someplace that naturally reverts to prairie, go for it. 
  

I'll end with this sobering assessment from the article:  "While meadows appear to come about as gracious, spontaneous gifts of nature, appearances deceive."  But the author also makes this very important point - that the initial maintenance of meadows may be intensive, but ultimately they have a low impact on the environment. 

Thanks to American Gardener editor Davis Ellis and horticulturist Peggy Bowers of the AHS for help with this article. Lower photo - Bowers hard at work - courtesy of the American Horticultural Society.

Comments

[Georgia Master Gardener]

I quote: "...that the initial maintenance of meadows may be intensive, but ultimately they have a low impact on the environment." My container of RoundUp specifically warns about using it near streams or rivers--yet the article says it was used multiple times, what appears to be a scant 1/4 mile from the Potamac?

[Spidra Webster]

What is "forb"? I assume that's short for something...

[susan harris]

Oops - sorry about that. From Wikipedia: A forb is a flowering plant with a non-woody stem that is not a grass. Since it is non-woody, it is not a shrub or tree either. Thus most wild and garden flowers, herbs and vegetables are forbs.

[Ellis Hollow]

With a few exceptions, plant communities move inexorably toward climax species. It is only with the expenditure of considerable energy that you can arrest that development at 'meadow' -- unless you are where grasslands are the climax.

A more ecologically sound way of arresting that development might be to use grazing animals. Most folks use managed grazing to maximize animal production and end up with a grass/legume mix. But it could probably be done to favor 'wildflowers'.

[susan harris]

It's interesting that if we're asking plants to do what they wouldn't do if left alone, it's not easy. There are no perfect ways to get there, even when the result is so beneficial to the environment, as is the case of meadows. Plus, starting with disturbed land, as in this case, adds to the challenge and it's really a process of remediation.

[Kim]

Georgia pointed out what I was going to say... it just seems odd to start the making of a natural space with the liberal use of Roundup. Why not a series of very controlled burns, like natural meadows often experience?

[spidra webster]

Thanks, Susan. I had tried looking it up on davesgarden.com thinking it was a common name for a particular plant. I should have Googled.

[Kathy, Washington Gardener]

Last Saturday I attended a talk by Andre Viette (inthegardenradio.com) and in his presentation he showed a slide of the USNA meadow and slammed it -- then showed what a "real" wildflower meadow on his dad's nursery (Martin Viette) in Long Island looked like. Gotta say - he had a point. The latter was solid flowers and color, the former a mass of weeds. His talking point was "gardening is easy," but in this case, even for the pros, creating a wildflower meadow is demonstrably difficult - LOL

[David Ellis]

Here are just a few of the more than 50 different herbaceous perennials--mostly American natives--that have been planted in the meadow at the American Horticultural Society's headquarters:

Asters--many, including A. ericoides, smooth aster (A. laevis), Michaelmas aster (Aster novi-belgii);
Milkweeds, including crimson milkweed, (Asclepias incarnata);
Perennial sunflowers, including Helianthus maximiliani;
Gayfeather (Liatris spicata);
Beebalms, including wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa);
Penstemons including Penstemon barbatus and Penstemon digitalis 'Husker Red';
Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium fistulosum);
Mountain mints (Pycnanthemum pilosum and Pycnanthemum tenuifolium);
Mexican hat (Ratibida columnifera and Ratibida pinnata);
Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia amplexicaulis and Rudbeckia fulgida var. speciosa);
New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis) and Ozark ironweed (Vernonia arkansana, syn. V. crinita);
Baptisia (Baptisia australis);
Purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea).

Regarding the comment about spraying Roundup near water--the manufacturer's directions for using the product, which we rigorously follow, state not to spray directly on water or in intertidal zones. In designing the meadow, we integrated a 150-foot buffer zone between the lowest section of the meadow and the high-water mark for the river, and our horticulturist applies Roundup only when there is a minimum 48-hour window with no rainfall predicted.

In response to the comment about burning, ideally we would have liked to conduct an annual controlled burn of the meadow. However, River Farm is located in a suburban community and our application for permission to hold controlled burns was turned down.

If anyone has questions about the meadow or would like to visit, I'd be happy to help. Just drop me an e-mail at dellis@ahs.org.