Pasture Perfect: A Wildflower Meadow, Photo Gallery

To read more about how wildflowers and meadows create a sustainable rural retreat, read our "Pasture Perfect" article. 

The mowed edge of a meadow runs up to a split-rail fence and hillside of purple coneflowers, rangy yellow cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum), and other native wildflowers and grasses.

Like a path trod through wildflower fields, a walkway of Pennsylvania bluestone leads to the back door. Tall Phlox paniculata are at left, black-eyed Susans are at right. 

The pool is shaped with several jogs to accommodate a shallow play area, a lap lane, and a hot tub. Weaner wanted to create a sense of traveling a path while swimming, ending with a clear view from the hot tub into a meadow. There’s a diving rock at left.

Natural Design

Purple coneflower and black-eyed Susan edge a rare patch of lawn. Weaner hesitates to call his plantings anything as formal as beds and borders — they’re like “more designed versions of a natural area,” he says, growing the way plants grow in nature with “some plants dropping out, others coming in, interacting with nearby meadows.”

A wildflower meadow stretches all the way to the doors of the house.

Formal Meets Functional In a view from the meadow, mowed native grass and a slope of wildflowers and native trees frame the house and pool. Weaner has created more than 200 meadows from Massachusetts to North Carolina, and stresses the importance of choosing species of meadow grasses and flowers known to grow well in an area’s microclimate, soil, and exposure — plants that will thrive with little help. He says, “You have to understand the unfolding processes of nature.”