took me a bit.. to figure out that might be a ski lift in the first pic?????

so these are sown garden beds .... not free range meadows ....???

regardless .... nice effect ... thx for the pix ...

ken

Yes, that's a ski lift (gondolas) in the first pic. The plants are not free range -- there's very little natural activity going on at that elevation and with the extremely short growing season. But they seem to be doing great with a bit of protection from structures, and help from the humans. From what I could observe, they were self-seeding nicely.

agreed..a great application ... ken

Lovely!

curious to know .... why were you at the ski lift... do they run it in summer ...

anyway ... i have been blessed with larger than the usual suburban lots ... trying to seed a flower meadow.. was an epic failure at both houses .. lol ...

now i just let a former horse pasture of an acre.. grow without moving .. and simply declared it a wildflower meadow.. lol ... much easier ... there is simply no work in simply making a declaration ... lol ...

ken

ps: i once declared myself lord god almighty of the house ... both lower case ... my EX wife wasnt buying it ... lol ... but she was ok when i deemed her goddess of the house ... yeah.. i am probably going to hell for blasphemy ... but it was funny at the time ....

The best gardening book I've ever read is The $64 Tomato by William Alexander. There's a chapter there "Nature Abhors a Meadow" that describes his attempts at establishing a meadow and it will make you LOL.

I dream of having a meadow but I also found out it only works if they occur naturally in your area. For me, it would turn into a collection of bermuda and weeds within a couple of seasons, probably.

Ken, that particular ski lift runs in the summer. They have a lot of activities set up around the mid-point lodge (climbing, obstacle courses, tubing, etc.) but you can take another chair lift all the way to the ridge, so you can skip the tedious part of climbing up the mountain to reach your trail. That works great for some of us who are not spring chickens anymore and want to cheat a little :)

These are everywhere now in the UK courtesy of seed companies like Pictorial Meadows.

Obviously, they are not meadows, not wild flowers and anything but natural but hey ho - gotta be better than the pathetic massed clumps of gazanias and cineraria currently masquerading as garden beds (still the mainstream council choices...enriching Dutch greenhouse business since forever...whilst local nurseries and council greenhouses have been sold off or gone out of business).

Good for me though, since I have not bought annual seed for the last 6 years since these schemes started appearing - a pleasant day of collie walking and seed collecting in early September (I visit a few of these planting sites) and my stash of cornflowers, flax, ammi, godetia, rudbeckias, coreopsis, scabious et al is refreshed for another year.

Stunning!

At this time of year, two native grasses set the fields singing with color as they do a year-end bloom. Erogrostis spectabilis/ purple love grass is the shorter, redder plant, and the tall, slightly reddish-gold plant such as the plants to left near the front of the color patch is Schizachyrium scoparium/Little bluestem. This is the field behind my house, but the medians and verges along the interstates are even brighter in the late afternoon sun as I drive home after work. DH waits to mow in the spring until the turkeys have hatched, and he waits in late summer until this blaze of color fades because he knows how much I love it.

I don’t know if this qualifies as a meadow since it is an old cow pasture that is mowed a couple of times annually, but the grasses sure are gorgeous right now.

NHbabs I would count that as a meadow.

A meadow can work where they are not naturally present, given that it is mowed once a year and weeded of invasives and trees as needed. If you take a totally hands off approach and select dainty little plants, sure it will eventually revert to forest, woodland, or a weedy mess. It will also probably end up being mostly grass or other tough plants like goldenrod.

There is an exit off the highway I pass everyday where the middle grass part is occupied by 6ft big blue stem right now, growing right adjacent to weedy trees, so I see it being done. In the coming weeks it will be lit up with goldenrod and Eupatorium serotinum and sessilifolium.

I visited this lake/reservoir in the Catskills with a nice meadow around it. Its mostly grass by composition but up close it was full of little flowers, and pretty flowering shrubs like Spiraea tomentosa near the water.

Purple Love Grass and Little Bluestem- two beautiful grasses for late summer color that makes our native bed shine. How I would LOVE to be able to have space to grow it like yours NHBabs. It is fantastic!

Here they both tend to grow where the soil is sandy and dry, since in other places they get outcompeted (is that a word?) by other plants. So in our fields and along the highway, they really tell you about how sandy the soil is in spots. This is an area that is an old glacial lake bed, so soil varies a lot depending on what washed in where.