lawns into meadows
One of the joys of meadow-making is converting a deadscape, like chemically treated lawn, into a wild habitat that supports pollinators, like bees, butterflies, and birds. Photo source: Owen Wormser
I’m checking in on a meadow project of mine. It’s late September in western Massachusetts. The sunlight pours through a clear sky with all the vigor of a summer day as I watch a monarch butterfly land on a spike of bluish-purple anise hyssop, and drink from it. For monarchs, which can travel thousands of miles to reach their winter homes, this meadow is like a gas station that lets them refuel on their journey south.
Only a year ago, this one-acre meadow was an empty field filled with old grass and ancient apple trees. Now it feeds a kingdom of pollinators, along with goldfinches, bluebirds, cedar waxwings, chickadees, and many other birds. Mice, voles, deer, and woodchucks forage here. The once-lifeless soil teems with microbial and fungal life that helps it store carbon and makes nutrients available to the plants. That same microscopic world produces sustenance for insects, worms, and other invertebrates, which in turn feed animals like toads and salamanders.
The power of seeds and plants to set in motion and support so much life in so little time is one reason I started my regenerative landscaping practice. I also credit a childhood spent largely out of doors. My parents, inspired by the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s, raised me and my sister in the woods of rural Maine. By choice, our house lacked most modern conveniences and our nearest, and only, neighbors lived almost a half mile away. Apart from my sister, I grew up without many playmates since I had to ride my bike for several miles to see friends, unless my parents could find time to drive me.
This is a view of a garden meadow in Northampton, Massachusetts, about 18 months after planting. It very quickly grew in enough to support pollinators and attract insect and bird life. Since this space was intended to be educational, organizers put up a sign explaining the garden and its value ecologically. Its beauty won over many skeptical residents, who supported additional plans for expansion. Photo source: Owen Wormser
Our daily rhythms revolved around the changing seasons, weather patterns, and the rise and fall of the sun. We used only kerosene lamps, so when the day ended, the night moved into and took over every corner of our house. The only source of heat was the wood my father chopped, so cold days outside meant freezing mornings inside before the woodstoves were fired up again. During the winter months, if you weren’t close to one of the stoves or forgot to refill them, the sharp cold was a biting reminder. Trips to the outhouse, always quick, were even speedier.
I got used to the cold, and rarely felt deprived as a boy. I think fondly of the times I sat next to one of those woodstoves at our kitchen table doing homework or reading a book. I liked getting to spend lots of time in the wilderness right outside our door, snowshoeing in winter, tapping maple sugar trees and helping plant our large vegetable garden in spring, and studying the plant and animal life around me all year long.
A view of the meadow at the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. This picture was taken just one year after I put down meadow seed on uncleared lawn. The lupine was not only the first species to bloom, it was the happiest, and spread very quickly. Photo source: Owen Wormser
My parents chose to use as little fossil fuel and plastic as possible both to help the planet, and to become more self-reliant. They weren’t purists—we had a car, I went to public school and later boarding school, we used dentists and doctors, and we bought clothes rather than making them. Still, they made many sacrifices in pursuit of a simpler life and a stronger connection to the earth. Traveling in the winter wasn’t an option because someone had to be at home to keep the stoves going. And in the summer my parents were generally too busy preparing for winter, by growing our food and chopping wood, to do much of anything else.
I’m grateful I had the chance to grow up living simply and close to nature. But as an adult, I really appreciate not having to heat up water before taking a shower or drive to a laundromat to wash my clothes. I’m very glad I don’t have to get up in the middle of a freezing cold night to use the outhouse. And I relish every time I get to watch a good movie or television show well after the sun goes down.
You don’t have to live off the grid to help the environment. There is a reasonable middle road to lightening your burden on this planet. Among the many options easier than giving up everything to live in a cabin in the north woods of Maine: Consume less. Buy locally. Cut back on meat and dairy. Compost your food waste. Grow some of your own food. Use public transportation whenever possible. Fly less. You can also grow a meadow instead of a lawn.
I designed a meadow garden for a retirement community in the center of its campus in Easthampton, MA. The goal from the beginning was to have residents do the actual planting. Everyone there used trowels and digging knives to plant the meadow grasses and flowers—900 plugs in all. By 2pm the project was installed and completed. Over my two decades as a designer, I’ve worked with hundreds of volunteers to plant regenerative landscapes. What I’ve observed is that where there’s enthusiasm, there’s a way to get almost any project done. Source: Owen Wormser
Lawns have become something of a national obsession. We waste an enormous amount of resources every year maintaining a closely cropped area of turf that totals more than 63,000 square miles, about the size of Washington State. By another measure, over 40 million acres of land in the continental United States were found to have some form of lawn on it. This massive footprint makes lawns the biggest irrigated crop grown in the United States, and it sucks up an outsized amount of fossil fuels, fertilizer, chemicals, and water. Landscape irrigation is estimated to account for nearly one-third of all residential water use, totaling nearly nine billion gallons per day or almost 13,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water.
To be fair, lawns serve a purpose. They offer places to play, which is something I was glad for as a kid. My parents may have grown much of our food, but they also made sure we had enough lawn to kick a soccer ball around on. And lawns have other uses beyond sports: As a designer, I sometimes use strips of turf as pathways in gardens or to frame a perennial meadow. But the vast majority of mowed lawns offer none of these advantages. Instead, they’re a danger to the planet and to many living things, including your children and pets.
A meadow is what can happen when you give the earth a chance to heal itself. When planted properly, it fills out easily and grows almost entirely on its own. With every year in the ground, meadow plants support more life and build healthier soil. This makes them quite efficient at parking carbon—just the opposite of a resource-guzzling lawn. Lawns are among the ways we burden nature. Meadows are far more generous, giving back to the earth much more than they take.
This four-acre meadow at Mt Holyoke College used to be a rarely used lawn. This image was taken just one year the college stopped mowing it. The effect was immediate, and beautiful. The college wisely put up a sign announcing “meadow-in-progress” so passersby knew the decision was intentional.
I decided to write Lawns Into Meadows because, along with so many people, I’m alarmed by how quickly our planet is overheating. Farmers are on the frontlines of global warming and forced to deal with a longer growing season, and more flooding, drought, and extreme storms, as well as new batches of pests swarming northward as the country warms.
Meadow builders have it much easier. While I’ve noticed more pests, and more weeds, too, a meadow is so resilient it can put up with just about anything. The wide variety of plants in a meadow offers some protection. But the plants themselves are strong, too. Many native plants across the country are struggling to survive climate-induced weather extremes. Native meadow plants? Not so much. And yet too few of us know that planting a meadow is even an option.
In my book, I outline steps you can take to create your own regenerative landscape, one that improves the environment by increasing biodiversity, enriching soil health, and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I help you evaluate the lot, yard, or community space you want to turn into a meadow to see if it’s suitable. (If it gets enough sun, it probably is.) I also offer guidance on how to design your meadow, and a list of twenty-one easy-to-grow perennials you can use as a starting point. The book also includes tips for introducing a meadow into your neighborhood when everyone else has a well-groomed lawn.
Recently, a friend of mine did something very simple. She allowed common milkweed to grow in one of her garden beds instead of pulling it out. Milkweed attracts monarch butterflies and their caterpillars––in this case, lots of them. Later that season we counted no fewer than fifty monarch chrysalises that had hatched. When I visited my one-acre meadow one last time before winter, I got to see a few more of these beautiful creatures sipping their last drink of nectar before flying off to Mexico. If more of us go ahead and plant meadows, they’ll have a much easier time finding their way back.
Excerpted from the book Lawns into Meadows: Growing a Regenerative Landscape. Owen Wormser earned a degree in landscape architecture and quickly adopted regenerative, low-maintenance practices in designing and building landscapes. Based in Western Massachusetts, his company, Abound Design, provides design, consulting, and installation services. He also runs a nonprofit that provides educational resources and hosts workshops on regenerative growing.