Turning lawns into meadows can have big benefits for people, wildlife and the climate. Here\u2019s why \u2018meadowscaping\u2019 has become the latest gardening craze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in Pennsylvania, they knew they didn\u2019t want a perfectly manicured front lawn like their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf \u2013 a flourishing, wild meadow home to diverse species of plants and animals. It was a bold plan, to be sure, considering it involved overhauling their entire lawn when they were new to the neighbourhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thankfully, Weaner Cooper had ideal support for the project \u2013 her father is Larry Weaner, a renowned ecological landscape designer (she is now chief executive of the firm he founded). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The landscape design style he uses relies predominantly on native plants, she says, aiming to work with how they want to grow rather than forcing them into particular areas. She grew up with a non-traditional garden curated by her father, which she remembers as a \u201cwoodland wonderland\u201d because it was designed to support large trees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, it\u2019s still heavily wooded and teems with other native plants that prefer a shadier plot (his property gets less light than the Coopers\u2019). Her father didn\u2019t plot it out or plant very much, she says, but did \u201cintentionally engage with it\u201d, encouraging what it seemed to want to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Weaner Cooper had always wanted to focus on native plants in her lawn and do less mowing, so rewilding their front lawn felt like the right move. But the Coopers\u2019 lawn is a different animal than her father\u2019s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s in full Sun and consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass \u2013 narrow-leaved grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow could fully take over. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rather than rip everything up and live with a drab, brown lawn for months, they decided to try strategically seeding and planting native plants into the existing turf, hoping it would eventually weed the turf out naturally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s easier in the sense that you don\u2019t need to be beating back as many weeds,\u201d explains Weaner Cooper. \u201c[The native plants] came in so thickly that [they] outcompeted a lot of the weed pressure that would have been there if we would have just made it brown.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took about two years, lots of planning, some careful weeding, and some trial and error, but eventually a medley of waist-high native plant species blanketed their vast front lawn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMeadowscaping\u201d, or turning a traditional lawn into a meadow, is a burgeoning trend experts in the field are noticing, especially among younger generations who tend to be more climate-aware than their predecessors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Compared to lawns, meadows \u2013 open landscapes filled with an array of non-woody plants such as tall grasses, flowers and herbs \u2013 are less expensive to maintain, require less water and energy and help sequester more CO2. Most importantly, they also encourage biodiversity and they\u2019re typically more appealing to pollinators, which are keystone species on which ecosystems depend. (BBC)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Turning lawns into meadows can have big benefits for people, wildlife and the climate. Here\u2019s why \u2018meadowscaping\u2019 has become the latest gardening craze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":484464,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[688],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-infotainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}