How to Plant and Grow a Wildflower Meadow

When you create a wildflower meadow—a sprawling mini-field bursting with colorful blooms—you're providing food and a place where butterflies, moths, bees, birds, and other living creatures can feed, pollenate, find mates, lay eggs, give birth, raise their young, and shelter in winter. You're also growing a carbon storage and rainwater management system that will help mitigate the effects of climate change—all while offering an evolving show of color and texture.

As if that weren't enough, tending to an ecosystem can deepen your sense of wellbeing, say our experts. Here, learn how (and when) to plant and grow your own wildflower meadow in your backyard.

Planning Your Wildflower Meadow

You'll be happiest with your wildflower meadow if you give yourself time to enjoy the planning process and get it right. When you understand how a meadow works, you can choose plants that will thrive and support the different forms of life that make up a functioning, independent ecosystem.

Identify Your Goals

Yes, a wildflower meadow is beautiful—but it can be so much more than that if you work towards goals that benefit local pollinators, bugs, and wildlife.

• Support pollinators: If you want to support pollinators with your wildflower meadow, you'll start by focusing on the ones that live in or pass through your area and the native flowers with the nectar and pollen they seek. From there, you'll plan enough variety in your meadow to have something in bloom all the time, spring through fall, "and preferably, many somethings in bloom all the time," says Jennie Cramer, founder of an online regenerative gardening course called Garden Rhythm.
• Provide a comprehensive habitat: To truly support pollinators, you should provide not just nectar and pollen but also habitat for all the stages of their lifecycles. "So when they're an egg, when they're a caterpillar, and if they overwinter in a certain way, we need the habitat for that," says Cramer.
• Support beneficial insects: You'll also want to support beneficial insects, known as natural enemies, that will provide free pest control by eating other bugs that harm your meadow plants. "If all we had was pollinators, but we didn't have the natural enemies, the ecosystem would be gone in a couple of life cycles," Cramer says.
• Support reptiles and small mammals: Reptiles, like snakes, as well as small mammals, like mice and voles that aerate the soil with their tunnels are also good neighbors. These little critters also break down plant materials so they can decompose. If you aren't thrilled about drawing these visitors to your yard, don't fret, Cramer adds—these aren't species that want to be in your house. "And all of them have a really important role in the ecosystem. It wouldn't be a functional ecosystem without them," she says.

Know Your Constraints

Municipal codes might dictate how tall your wildflower meadow can be. Or a neighbor's trees might throw too much shade on your property for a meadow, which will need at least a half-day of full sun, if not more, to thrive. (If that counts you out, consider planting a forest understory ecosystem instead, Cramer says—or develop a backyard food forest.)

Research Native Plants

The best plants for your meadow will be native to your region, because that's what will thrive independently in your climate and soil. Check with your state or county extension service for help developing a list, or consider signing up for Cramer's course. The Xerces Society also offers region-specific lists of plants that support pollinators and vendors that sell them as plants or seeds.

Depending on where you live, the native wildflowers you plant may include some of the following:

• Red columbine
• Common milkweed
• Common yarrow
• Black-eyed Susan
• Purple coneflower
• Pussy willow
• Aster
• Anemone
  

Start Small

The prospect of installing a meadow can feel overwhelming to a lot of people, says Owen Wormser, a landscape designer and the author of Lawns Into Meadows, which also offers a plant list and step-by-step guide for planting and caring for an organic meadow. "You're dealing with living plants and soil and different factors. It's intimidating and also a little bit mysterious," he says.

That's why he encourages starting small, maybe with a 5-foot-by-5-foot trial plot where you can see what plants thrive and which pollinators visit. "That's going to inform you and help you understand what works. And then you can go on to a bigger project," Wormser says.

How to Plant a Wildflower Meadow

You can plant your wildflower meadow as seeds or as plugs—small plants that will show faster results but will also cost more and require a more work on your part to get in the ground. Both seeds and plugs are available online and becoming more widely available at local nurseries, too.

When to Plant a Wildflower Meadow

You can plant seeds any time since they'll lie dormant until the soil temperature and moisture are right to germinate, says Worser. That said, people tend to like seeding in spring or fall because that's when they'll see immediate results.

If you're going with plugs, plant in spring to coincide with seasonal rains, which will make your job easier. Spring planting also helps the young plants get established before the heat of summer hits.

Prepare the Soil

You can plant over a lawn, allowing the grass to grow out along with your new meadow plantings—but lawn turf doesn't always look great in a meadow and existing weeds can take over quickly, Wormser says.

Instead, he and others recommend clearing the site of all vegetation as a first step. Wormser suggests tilling the ground and covering it with black plastic to deprive existing grass and weeds of sunlight. The intense heat under the plastic not only kills grass and weeds but also cooks their root systems and seeds, providing a fresh slate for meadow plants. Known as solarization, the process takes four to six weeks.

Start Planting

If you're going with seeds, consider also planting a nurse crop, which will protect the soil from erosion and green up your space quickly while you wait for your seeds to grow and fill in, Wormser says. An annual rye grass or oats will sprout within a few days, and you can follow with your wildflower seeds, tossing them out by hand and lightly raking them in. For a larger space, you can rent a hand-pushed broadcast spreader to help tackle the job.

If you're planting plugs, you'll use a trowel to dig a hole for each one and fill in around it, following with a mulch, such as straw, bark, or dry shredded leaves.

How to Care for a Wildflower Meadow

Your wildflower meadow will look good after its first year, and it will be much easier to care for than a lawn. But it's not a no-care endeavor, especially in its first three to four years of life.

Water and Re-Planting

Early on, you might have to provide supplemental watering—and you might need to replace some species entirely. "In the early years, some of the species you planted won't survive, and weeds will try and come in," Cramer says. She suggests monitoring and troubleshooting your meadow in real time to determine which adjustments to make year over year: "Did thistles somehow invade when I had bare soil? And do I need to add more species, because certain species didn't do well the year I planted?" she says to ask.

Develop Flower Variety

You might also decide to add more of a color or texture you like. And if you've seen a certain type of bird or butterfly in the area, you can research what it needs and provide more of that.

Creating a wildflower meadow or restoring any garden ecosystem is a process, and a joyful one. "It's a reciprocal thing," Cramer says. "And that's what I love about it. You're giving back to the earth. But in turn, your gardening becomes easier, more beautiful, and more abundant. Because the natural feedback loop that already exists in nature, to keep things going, is now happening in your garden."