How to Get a Blooming Lawn

Given a large enough area to plough, or one small enough to dig over, it is possible to begin a flowering hay meadow from scratch with appropriate supplies from a reputable wildflower seed merchant.

This method would appear to have a lot to recommend it, as you can choose your favorite flower and grass mix suitable for local conditions.

Sit back and wait for a colorful pageant unfold before your eyes.

Until recently it was very difficult to buy wildflower seeds, bulbs or plants. Now there are reliable sources where you can buy guaranteed native species, sustainably grown and collected.

Editor’s Note: If you go to Google and put in “wildflower seeds” a number of sources of seeds show up. I was particularly interested in the variety offered by American Meadows (www.americanmeadows.com), because they offer both native varieties as well as standard wildflowers for any one region. You can turn any lawn into a meadow, the person I spoke to at the store says, in fact “people do it all the time.”

I was heartened that turning my lawn into a wildflower meadow was actually very possible. To plant you need to till, and you need one mowing a year–in the fall. The American Meadows site also provides the following seven pages of detailed instructions for how to plant your wildflower lawn.

Read more: Nature, Lawns & Gardens

Adapted from The Blooming Lawn, by Yvette Verner (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998). Copyright (c) 1998 by Yvette Verner. Reprinted by permission of Chelsea Green Publishing.
Adapted from The Blooming Lawn, by Yvette Verner (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998).