When I teach lawn management, the first point I make to my students is the lawn is so important its location must be selected first when you are designing a new landscape.  Decide where you want to play, gather and circulate—that should be lawn.  The rest of your landscape should be something else.  What else, you say?  You really have three choices: traditional landscape beds, forest or meadow.  Traditional landscape beds provide lots of interest and beauty in a garden but they can be costly to install and take a lot of time to maintain.  Most landscapes will have some traditional landscape beds.  Using mulch to reduce weeds and locating plants to be the tree canopy, shrub layer and groundcover make landscape beds more manageable.  Using native plants attracts native wildlife.  Starting small and allowing plants to grow together will reduce the initial cost and allow plants to establish more easily.

The second option is a forest or woodland.  Most people think they don’t have a large enough property for a forest, but you can have a small tree grove (i.e. forest) on very little land.  And it doesn’t have to cost anything.  At the University of Delaware Botanic Garden we let a small area of what used to be a golf course become a forest over the course of about 15 years.  The trees (red maple, sweet gum, black cherry, birch, tulip poplar, oak) were all planted by the birds, squirrels and wind.  The only maintenance involved was removing exotic invasive species that might have taken over the forest if we had allowed them.  So, if you have 10 years, stop mowing and eventually you will have a forest.  If you want to jump start the process, plant small trees, woodland shrubs (i.e. spicebush, viburnum, witchhazel) and forest ground cover (ferns, wood asters, celandine poppy).

Option three is the least expensive but also least understood landscape—a meadow.  Fortunately, Longwood Gardens is attempting to change our perception of a meadow.  Visit Longwood Gardens’ meadow–just opened to the public this June. It is 86 acres and contains 3 miles of walking trails.  Obviously larger than a typical residential meadow, it shows the visitor various components of meadow that could be incorporated into a home landscape.  The back bone of the meadow is warm season grasses.  Indiangrass, switchgrass, prairie dropseed and little bluestem are a few of the grasses native to our region.  Throughout the meadow, you will see blooming perennials like butterfly weed and black-eyed Susan.  At key nodes in the meadow, such as path intersections, bridges, benches and other structures, you will find more flowering perennials planted in masses.  The vistas are wonderful but the details are also charming.   One of the most important parts of the meadow is the path systems.  Paths provide access to a meadow and also show the meadow is being managed.

How can you incorporate a meadow into your home landscape?  Many people have large front lawns that are used for nothing other than taking a few hours weekend time to mow.  Keep a small area of maintained lawn around the house and let the rest of the lawn become a meadow.  Be sure to mow the edges routinely and if the yard is large enough, mow a curving path through the meadow.  It could be your back or side yard isn’t serving an important function and could become a meadow, reducing the time spent mowing, helping water infiltrate into your soil, providing a home for wildlife (birds and butterflies) and providing a different and desirable aesthetic to your home.  The least expensive way to start a meadow is to simply stop mowing.  The plants that come in will depend on your soil, moisture available and surrounding area.  If you want to jump start the process you can seed a meadow (for more information on seeding a meadow refer to this brochure:  http://extension.udel.edu/lawngarden/files/2012/06/live_eco_final.pdf).  Another great meadow example can be found at the Mt. Cuba Center.  Start to explore the possibility of having your own meadow and spend your weekends admiring the birds instead of cutting the grass.

Residential landscape in Delaware with meadow as a front lawn rather than mown turf.

We have had a fantastic spring for planting.  Frequent rains have provided regular water to anything you planted this spring.  It is about time to wrap up planting for the season.  Of course, you can plant all summer but you will have to be much more vigilant about watering newly planted trees, shrubs and perennials as the weather gets warmer and the rainfall less frequent (probably if we are going to have a normal Delaware summer).  If the weather gets really dry, you will need to water most of the plants you put in this spring.  Plants shouldn’t be considered fully established until they have gone through at least one complete growing season.  Large trees may take several years to become fully established.   Consider using a gator bag on newly planted trees.  Fill up the bag with a hose and the water will trickle out slowly allowing the soil to absorb all the water and making it available to the tree roots.  The same thing can be accomplished with a five gallon bucket that has a few holes punched in the bottom.  You can also water using a hose set at trickle, but that takes much more time and effort to keep moving the hose once the soil has become saturated.  Do not apply water faster than what your soil can absorb.  Water that runs off is wasted and can cause erosion and particulate pollution in nearby waterways.

With the bulk of your planting completed, it is time to turn your gardening attention to taking care of your plants.  Early summer is the time to prune spring flowering shrubs.  Always cut branches back to another branch or bud, never leaving a branch stump.  Remove the longest branches to reduce the size of your shrubs but maintain their natural form.  As perennials finish blooming, remove spent flowers to conserve the plant’s resources. Some perennials and shrubs will even re-bloom if cut back after flowering and before seed heads develop. But, if you want to encourage seeding to spread a ground cover or plant you want to fill into a larger space, then leave seed heads on and allow seeds to mature.  You might also want to leave seed heads to feed birds.  Gold finches love cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) seeds, but I am always torn about leaving seeds because this plant seeds into the garden prolifically. Cut back fall-blooming plants, like mums and asters, now to encourage a compact habit when they bloom in August to October.

If you are managing a meadow, you may want to cut the meadow back now (mid to late June) to keep grasses from flopping later in the season.  We have had a wet spring, so grasses will be at the taller end of their normal range and may flop unless they are cut back now.  If you are cutting back your meadow, mow it to a height of 6-8 inches.  It will look sloppy for a few days, but the grasses and perennials in the meadow will quickly regrow and your meadow will be dense and lush again soon.  You should be mowing paths through your meadow to provide access and a “cue of care.”  You can mow the path on the same schedule as the rest of your lawn (approximately weekly) and mow one mower width on each side of the path every several weeks.  That will also help to keep the meadow looking neat and tidy and keep the path clear of flopping grasses.

This cup plant (tall yellow flower on the right) will feed gold finches but it will also seed into the garden, so be careful.