Recreating your paradises: Ornö - Chelsea

One of the most captivating views of my vacation was this field of barley, grown as fodder for the sheep of the beautiful island of Ornö near Stockholm. Like sparkling sapphires emerging from a feathery sea, bright cornflowers filled the stony soil between soft mounds of bedrock, blissfully oblivious to the fact that weed-free, roundup-ready seed for barley has ever been invented... The golden greens and radiant blues were stunning in their simplicity, shimmering against a background of leaden greys and greens provided by the surrounding cliffs and forests.

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While contemplating how hard the elysian look of natural meadows is to recreate, I suddenly remembered  a picture that I snapped at the Chelsea Flower Show back in 2007. Somehow this tiny, highly-groomed show garden planted with Mexican feather grass and hot orange Potentillas managed to deliver an impression that resonated with the ancient agrarian fields of Ornö, despite their being each others complete opposites in purpose and execution, and even contrasting in colours. 

At their best, meadows are like grassy seas interlaced with flowers, large enough to be waded through to get that special feeling of paradise-like freedom that I think is so typical for them. Usually, to achieve their  natural, wild beauty, a fair amount of space and land is required. But sometimes, as the picture from Chelsea shows, miniature meadows can work like gem-like icons, conveying in a condensed form all the qualities of a larger meadow. 

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I'll keep this pair of pictures in my mind; I find them completely fascinating. And maybe, a mini-Ornö will appear somewhere in my garden one day. You never know.

Special greetings to my dear friend Yvonne, with whom I've wandered through both show gardens in Chelsea and barley fields at Ornö...

The mysterious mounds of Mima

In spring, the soft mounds of the Mima prairie are covered with a delicate tapestry of grasses and flowering plants.

Last Monday was a holiday, so we decided to visit the Mima Mounds, one of the last remaining prairies in Washington state. This strictly protected natural park with its undulating, rounded mounds is something of a mystery. Six to eight feet high and thirty feet across, these soft hummocks form a strange, unreal landscape that no-one has been able to explain how it came into being.
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The Mima Mounds prairie covers today about 700 acres, but is greatly diminished from its earlier days.

There has been several theories of how the Mima Mounds were formed. The Upper Chehalis Tribe, the first peoples of the area, believed that they were left behind after a great flood subsided. "It rained and rained... and the whole world was flooded... there was nothing but prairie land beneath the water... at last the water fell, but the earth still remained in the form of waves." In the 1800s, European travelers and explorers were intrigued by the rounded, wavy prairie and their explanations for the mounds ranged from ancient burial sites to water-sculpted river beds.

The delicate stars of Camas, Camassia quamash. It was cultivated as an edible by the first nations of the Pacific Northwest.

  

Fine-leaved desert parsley, Lomatium utriculatum, is a favorite of butterflies.

Today, modern science has established that the Mima Mounds were formed after the ice-age glaciers receded about 16 500 years ago, but it is still a mystery exactly how. There are theories of intersecting earthquake waves that would have collected soil into tops and dales, about water patterns, and even that they were the work of pocket gophers excavating nest chambers (some industrious gophers, as the prairie reaches several miles in diameter).

Early blue violets, Viola adunca, provide food for caterpillars and butterflies. Many of them lay their eggs in the wilting leaves of the violets.

Prairie lupin, Lupinus lepidus, is another important food plant for caterpillars and butterflies.

Western buttercup, Ranunculus occidentalis, is native to the prairies of the West.

The Mima Mounds is home to several plant species, and in the spring time they form a delicate tapestry of flowers and grasses, filled with Camas, violets, chocolate lilies, buttercups and many other prairie species that are today well-known as garden plants around the world. For the first peoples, these prairies were an important source of food, and rights to tend parts of the prairie were inherited from generation to generation. Especially bulbs of the Camas, Camassia quamash, were an important source of carbohydrates, as they are sweet and tasty when slowly cooked. To keep the prairie from turning into forest, the first peoples burned their areas early or late in season, when the bulbs were dormant.

An old mound, overgrown with trees. If the prairie would not be burn with regular intervals, the forest would take over. The trees prefer to grow on the top of the mounds.

Today, some 700 acres of the Mima prairies are tended by the Nature Conservancy and the Department of Natural Resources, who practice controlled burning and weed management in the area. A small display about the history and vegetation has been installed for visitors, and platforms and pathways guide them through the area without damaging the fragile environment.

While wandering around the beautiful, slightly bizarre meadow, we couldn't help trying to find our own solution to the unsolved mystery. My daughters theory was that a flock of dinosaurs had laid their eggs and then been disturbed by something, leaving behind the soil-covered eggs. I thought theirs was at least as good as the gopher theory... until someone figures out what really happened.

European meadows, American meadows

A seaside meadow, technically really a pasture, by the seashore in Victoria, Australia.

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I've had a long lasting love affair with meadows, which I've confessed earlier in a post called Meadows, meadows everywhere. And the larger community of gardeners seem to share my affection for meadows, judged by the steady flow of articles, books and blog posts that fill the media on all continents.

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So as you can guess, it didn't take long to make John Greenlee's book The American Meadow Garden - Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn (Timber Press, 2010) the newest addition to my library. Based on Greenlee's decades long experience as a nurseryman and garden designer, and illustrated with Saxon Holt's lavish photographs from all corners of the US, this well-written book is a real treasure for devotees of all things grassy - lawns strictly excluded. Covering all bases from natural habitats and design tips to plant information and advice on cultivation, it will probably be "the classic American grass gardening book" for years to come.

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Saxon Holt's pictures in The American Meadow Garden are both instructive and inspirational at the same time, not an easy feat to achieve. (I snatched this picture from the net, shame on me...)
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Greenlee's language reflects his deep passion for his subject: "Grasses are sensual. You can smell them, and hear them, and watch them move. Meadows are sexy, just like lovers - they never stop changing, never ceasing to surprise." Likewise, it shows his contempt for lawns; according to him, traditional such are "huge, time-consuming, water-guzzling, synthetic-chemical-sucking mistakes". He shows no mercy for any historic or geographic considerations to nail down his point, which sometimes feels a bit simplistic. After all, in some climates, lawns can be maintained with little or no watering, in small gardens, muscle-powered reel movers are perfectly ecological, and using harmful chemicals is not a necessity. And anyone who thinks that a perennial-filled large meadow thrives with "minimal input" of anything must be dreaming. Still, Holt's pictures of Greenlee's designs show temptingly shimmering gardens that are sensual and hugely attractive, two characteristics that few lawn gardens can boast of.

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A meadow in front of the old barn at Christopher Lloyd's Great Dixter. His book "Meadows" is still one of the best ever written about the subject.

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I love Greenlee's enthusiasm and commitment to challenging the dominance of lawns in American gardens. Throughout the book, his designs are both beautiful and ecologically sound, and his deep knowledge of his subject makes the book both practical and instructive. There is only one thing that bothers me (and even then slightly), and it is the use of term meadow of Greenlee's gardens.

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When I think of a meadow, I think of a delicate tapestry of breezy grasses interlaced with fleeting shows of dainty flowers. Probably because of my northern European background, my mind goes back to the Scandinavian meadows that carpet hills, forests sides and seaside clearings after the dark, frozen winters like small wonders (like the one below...). Or alpine flower meadows that look like a perfect background for Fräulein Maria and the von Trapp children to frolic on.

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I know I've published this before, but this is still my favorite meadow...

So when looking at some of the meadow designs in this book, I have difficulties with thinking of them as such; especially when large specimens of Miscanthus grasses, sedges, and perennials are grown in well-positioned swathes, all arranged for the maximum effect. These gardens are well-designed and often stunning, but are they really meadows? Greenlee talks about them as "designed meadows", but rather than a carefully arranged design, isn't a meadow more a process with an amount of unpredictability to it, even when it has been created with a great care to its habitat? And isn't it just that unpredictability and randomness the reason why we are drawn to their natural or naturalistic beauty? Beautiful as they are (just like any well-designed gardens), I think Greenlee's grass gardens have too much control to really be meadows.

But then, Greenlee writes about The American Meadow Garden; just like when an European orders an entrée before and an American for his/her main course, we might think about and see meadows differently, too, having been influenced by the natural habitats of our continents (like most things in America, the meadows too are often more lush and taller than their European cousins). But whether or not meadows, Greenlee's grass gardens are often breathtakingly beautiful and always ecologically sound, and they are well worth to be studied by all gardeners interested in creating earth-friendly habitats.

Meadows, meadows everywhere

Meadow gardening in Sweden in the 1930s. Picture by Sven A. Hermelin, published in Hem i Sverige 1935.

Meadow gardening has really taken off during the recent years and seems to create as much headlines here in the U.S. as it does in Sweden and other European countries. One of the most beautiful books in this area is the late Christopher Lloyd's "Meadows" (Timber Press, 2004), a captivating guide about how to preserve grasslands, and establish and maintain meadows. Of course, other excellent books exist, but I am a long time fan of Christopher Lloyd's writing, which always is extremely well-informed, entertaining and lively. (Sadly, he died just before my first visit to Great Dixter, and wandering there knowing he would never be gardening or writing again was a very sad moment. It is strange how some writers make you feel like you would know them personally - for me, I really felt like I had lost a close friend, even if I never met him).

Meadow at Great Dixter. The strictness of the huge Taxus topiary figures contrast so well with the dainty meadow flowers. And my daughters are taking in all the beauty.

Meadows as a gardening practice are decendants of two different origins: natural meadows, and a farming practice, which resulted in meadows. A natural meadow is a perpetual grassland - a habitat of rolling or flat terrain where grasses predominate. These grasslands are so called climax ecosystems that are capable of sustaining themselves; environmental factors restrict the growth of woody plants and therefore the grasslands are kept clean of shrubs and trees, which otherwise would succeed the grasses. Some typical environments for natural meadows are the alps, coasts, deserts and the prairies, all with harsh growing conditions (cold, wind, salt, heat, drought).

The meadow in my garden in Saltsjöbaden - kept in bay by the cold and salty winds from the sea, but still needing maintenance to keep out the unwanted invaders.

Meadows formed also as a result from the ancient farming practice of growing winter feed for the cattle on open land. The grasses were cut down in the end of the summer and carted away and their seeds were left on the fields, and so could regenerate the vegetation the following spring. Pastures are not really meadows as they are continuously grazed by animals that keep the grass short the whole season.

Beautiful, seaside pastureland with grazing sheep at Beachyhead, East Sussex; I warmly recommend it as a a wonderful place to visit.

Meadow gardening and "prairie style" gardening have been popular since the 1990's when Piet Oudolf's and Oehme & van Sweden's designs (only mention a very few) got a lot of space in the gardening magazines. And of course, Christopher Lloyd's many books, with beautiful pictures of lovely meadows have had an enormous impact. In my research for my first garden history thesis, I found some wonderful articles in Swedish gardening magazines from the 1930s promoting meadows in gardens, as the first picture above. During the 1930s, meadows as an agricultural practise was disappearing and many garden writers were worried about that the cultural and ecological environments would disappear as well. One of the most popular garden architects in Sweden during that time, Sven A. Hermelin, suggested using meadows instead of lawns in gardens, as they are more esthetically pleasing and give a larger biodiversity than the monotonity of a close-cut lawn. It just took another 60 years before his thoughts became popular... is nothing ever new in gardening?

A birds-eye view of the meadow towards the moat and the pavillion at Sissinghurst, with mown paths, roses and fruit trees in the grass. I took this picture from Vita Sackville-Wests writing tower.

Later update: see also my post European meadows, American meadows.