'Meadowscaping': The people turning their lawns into meadows

Turning lawns into meadows can have big benefits for people, wildlife and the climate. Here's why 'meadowscaping' has become the latest gardening craze.

When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in Pennsylvania, they knew they didn't want a perfectly manicured front lawn like their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf – 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. Thankfully, Weaner Cooper had ideal for the project – her father is Larry Weaner, a renowned ecological landscape designer (she is now executive director of the educational arm of his design firm). 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 re as a "woodland wonderland" because it was designed to large trees. Today, it's still heavily wooded and teems with other native plants that prefer a shadier plot (his property gets less light than the Coopers'). Her father didn't plot it out or plant very much, she says, but did "intentionally engage with it", encouraging what it seemed to want to do.

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' lawn is a different animal than her father's. It's in full Sun and consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass – narrow-leaved grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow could fully take over. 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. 

"It's easier in the sense that you don't need to be beating back as many weeds," explains Weaner Cooper. "[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."

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.

"Meadowscaping", 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. Compared to lawns, meadows – open landscapes filled with an array of non-woody plants such as tall grasses, flowers and herbs – are less expensive to maintain, require less water and energy and help sequester more CO2. Most importantly, they also encourage biodiversity and they're typically more appealing to pollinators, which are keystone species on which ecosystems depend.

Climate change and habitat degradation are leading to major losses of native species in ecosystems worldwide, which in turn can disrupt how those ecosystems function. Meanwhile, lawns cover about 23% of the US's urban land areas and 70 to 75% of open green space in cities worldwide. The more people who rewild their lawns, the more significant the environmental impacts that could be seen, from lower pollution and stormwater runoff to a reduction in soil erosion and urban heat island effects, all while improving local biodiversity and soil and groundwater quality.

But meadowscaping isn't as simple as only locking your mower away (sorry, NoMoMay). There are methods to meadowscaping, and they aren't always the most intuitive, especially for beginners. To help others get started, Weaner Cooper's landscape design firm developed an online course taught by her father that walks interested parties through the steps, from interweaving aesthetics and ecology to addressing practical garden issues.

One of the most common questions from participants in the course, Weaner Cooper says, is, "How should I handle my neighbours who might not appreciate how my meadow looks while it's in progress">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });