KILL YOUR LAWN! (Creating a Meadow: The plant list, the vision)

Death to the sod.  Down with the water hogging, habitat denuded, boring, high maintenance, manicured space filler... time for something meatier.  Building a California Native Meadow.

Blue-Eyed Grass: not a grass at all
but a member of the Iris family.

To start this project, we started with our vision and how we wanted to get there.  Instead of our neat and tidy (and thirsty) lawn, we wanted to create a wildflower and native grass meadow and eventually replace the perimeter shrubs and trees with natives.  Starting with the lawn we came up with the following:

We wanted the meadow to be primarily a single dominant grass species that needed little water, was clumping, spread by rhizomes, low mounding and a good base for mixing in perennial and annual wildflowers.  (PS- in case you are new to plants, perennial are plants that last from year to year and annuals die each year and are reborn from seed).  We wanted to use the dominant grass species mixed with a few perennial species as "the canvas" to then plant swaths of taller grasses and annual wildflowers.  Since we have children and love to have the neighborhood kids jump on our landscape boulders too- we wanted to make sure that it could withstand some traffic and not have to be babied.  After a lot of research, we decided on the following.

Red Fescue planted as a lumpy lawn.

Red Fescue (Festuca rubra) would be the dominant species.  Many different species could have worked here, but we chose the F. rubra because it has low mounds (3-12" high), spreads by rhizomes, can tolerate some shade, is noted as working well in meadow gardens, can be mowed and is also disease and pest free.  Sounds perfect, right?  Well... lets hope so!  It also happens to be really really beautiful.

We wanted to mix in some selected perennial wildflowers in low density to decorate the fescue- so we added White Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), Padre's Shooting Stars (Dodecatheon clevelandii), Western Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum), Buttercups (Ranuculus californicus) and Purple Owl Clover (Castilleja exserta).

Buttercup (top) & White Yarrow

We picked these because they are all found at Edgewood Preserve which is our local park that is famous for wildflowers.  All the species in the front meadow are not just native, but local so that people can expect that what we grow also grows in the local hills.  The Purple Owl Clover was specifically picked because it is a host plant for the endangered Bay Checkerspot butterfly.  I don't have a lot of delusion that we can get them into our yard, but if we can... I want them!  So we are planting the clover in hopes that we will get caterpillars and butterflies.

Purple Needlegrass

Shooting Star- may take up to
three years to bloom.

Purple Owl Clover

Shooting stars are one of my favorite wildflowers and are always so exciting to find- but they are hard to find in nurseries.  I think that I found out why when I read that one nursery had to wait three years for blooms!  My favorite seed supplier didn't have them, but I managed to find seed in the UK (!) and am thrilled to find out if they will grow.

Our "Canvas" would mostly be the fescue with the above species mixed in evenly by adding a few packets to the 1/2# of fescue seeds.

Ca. Poppies and Lupine

Tidy Tips

The next species that we planted were to be "painted" onto the "canvas" in broad swaths.  Purple Needlegrass (Nassella pulchra) is the state grass of California (who knew?) and is amazing in that its roots can grow up to 20' deep!  It is a taller grass that we wanted to have in big swaths to show off more dramatically against the lower mounding F. rubra.  Of course we HAD to have California Poppies (Eschscholzia californica) which are our state flower (and we knew that one, right?), as well as Tidy Tips (Layia platyglossa), Miniature Lupine (Lupinus bicolor), and Five Spots (Nemophila maculata).  Each of these annuals are most spectacular when massed, so we would spread the seeds in swaths to stand out against the fescue.

Five Spots

The idea of picking these species is that we wanted to bring some of what people would find at Edgewood into our own yard.  There are a number of species that I would love to add to our meadow, but we want to stay true to picking only those found regionally.  The next phase will involve planting live plants into specific places as the meadow starts to mature.  We expect that it will take about 5 years of growth for it to really being to mature and in that time, we will begin to add the other trees and shrubs around the perimeter that will help finish the yard.

This meadow will be dynamic throughout the year with spring being spectacular and summer being, uh... well... uh... less spectacular.  These species are adapted to wet winters and dry summers and will go dormant in the summer.  We will add some supplemental water this year and as needed to get the plants established and then hopefully- we will not water at all, or very rarely.  I expect to water once a week at most this year (depending on rain) and hope to scale back to once a month as the plants take hold.

Would be really thrilled if we could get something looking like this!