The American Meadow Garden: Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn

Though I pre-ordered this book and waited for three (3) months for the release, I now realize that I have actually been waiting for this book for years! After reading the American Meadow Garden, I feel positively free to dig up my lawn and replace it with a wonderland of ornamental grasses and native perennials.I have been gardening on the East Coast for over 25 years and have been huge fan of John Greenlee's West Coast work. His other reference work on ornamental grasses is a staple in my gardening library. In that text, as in his new book he is always careful to address all regions and environmental conditions that horticulturists might face.I have contemplated meadow gardening before, actually for a long time, as it is an age-old method of xeriscaping. I know full well that it is a nice thing to do for the Earth. I've researched the benefits, even visited sites such as Kurt Bluemel's design at the River Farm Meadow in Virginia that happens to be elgantly featured in this book ([...]). It always seemed like a nice place to visit and I really WOULD like to live there except for one hitch.Truthfully, I've always worried about what the neighbors would say if I had huge stands of ornamental grasses and a soft, wispy palette of butterfly attracting perennials with no suburban turf. What would they say if I didn't meet neck and neck with the Saturday morning mower-brigade? Would the mulch guy stop sending a fruit-log at Christmas if I stopped ordering my annual 12 yards? How would visitors feel if I gave up on keeping tidy paths and elongated turf vistas in the traditional methods of Gertrude Jekyll and Rosemary Verey?Who cares what they think; I hate fruit cake anyway! I have found a new truth. I will woo them all with my new effort that will be carefully mapped from my Greenlee guide. I will spend the winter contemplating the release of my inner passion to have my very own meadow. I now have a comprehensive plant list specific to my region and garden conditions. All that information, coupled with inspiration and confidence, I am now armed and looking forward to shopping for my new mini-ecosystem. Fingers crossed that I find the things that I truly want! Only question left is how I'll spend my Summer Saturdays. Perhaps collecting wildflowers in my yard with the faint background noise of "other people's mowers." Hope they catch on and buy the book!

Beautiful photos. Agreed.The Great American Lawn is a chemical sucking, water sucking wasteland. Agreed.Planting with anything BUT natives local (genotype) to the region. DISAGREE.Learning to live with European/Asian/African exotic weeds and invasives. For-absolutely-get it.Greenlee misses the point that the reason for installing an "American" (which implies native plants in my mind) meadow garden is to correct habitat so that fundamentally, insects and then the rest of the food chain can live there. No matter how pretty, if the plants do not satisfy the needs of the insect community (IE: no matter what we think, Monarchs need milkweed to reproduce. End of discussion according to the Monarchs. So, you can plant what you like in hopes of supporting Monarchs, but if there is no milkweed, they are out of here), this garden is not doing its job. Chewed, by the way, is good. These are not gardens primarily for humans, they are for re-establishing diversity and sustainability in the environment. That we benefit by their beauty is a side effect in my mind. If you are going to go through the time and trouble of digging out the dreaded lawn, you might also consider the larger reason you are doing this: it's to recreate balance in the natural world.Books like this freak me out as they mislead the beginner. The impulse is right, but the planting advice in many places in this book are off target. One would be much better off with Bringing Nature Home by Tallamy (read the last chapter first for inspiration). Also, check out your local nature centers and find the native plant growers in your region for some solid advice on how to get started. No point in spending money to repeat a prettier version of that stupid lawn.BTW: this is a major cultural shift and guaranteed the neighbors won't like it one bit. They like their lawns and consider native plants "weeds." Don't let that deter you, keep on knowing that in the course of the universe, you are doing the right thing. (But do it with the right plants.) PS: ABSOLUTELY no pesticides, fungicides, insecticides or "cides" of any sort in the native garden. Keep in mind your goal: restoration. Mother Nature knows what she is doing, that's what predators are for: they keep populations under control. The day the Preying Mantis show up, is the day you break out the champagne as your garden is doing its job.

At our vacation cottage we have been doing a "meadow garden" which combines some perennials such as peonies, hosta, day lillies, ferns, and grasses with a number of self-seeding wild flowers such as monarda, echinacea, rudbeckia, daisies and phlox. It is delightful to see how the self seeding flowers gravitate to the spots that they like. We have color May through August. People stop and take pictures in July and August. Unlike a lawn this requires an intense clean-up in March or April, heavy weeding in June, tapering off into July and a bit of August, and no care at all the rest of the year. In recent years we have used little or no fertilizer. The "Amerrican Meadow Garden" book seems to focus a bit differently and narrowly on grasses as opposed to flowering color, but basically affirms the general concept.

This is a great book for anyone contemplating a meadow garden. It gives a blow by blow explanation of how to go about this task with a chapter towards the end on actually planting the garden. There are great nursery resources in the back as well. My only two complaints are: it is heavy on California and in the plant descriptions there is no notation to plants being deer resistant - which may not be a big thing to some but to those of us out in some rural areas - it is important to know.

Un bel volume con splendide immagini di taglio divulgativo tipico anglosassone, che presenta le nuove soluzioni di planting design ricercato con graminacee ed erbacee, ispirato da un approccio a basso impatto. Il libro, con prevalenti le immagini sui testi, è strutturato in capitoli generali e di schede descrittive di giardini e piante.Rappresenta un riferimento per le soluzioni stilistiche che probabilmente vedremo sempre più diffuse nei prossimi anni, mentre può esserlo solo in parte per le specie da impiegare, perchè molte sono autoctonee non disponibili in italia.Vivamente consigliato ai professionisti del settore e agli appassionati.