By: Owen Wormser
All images courtesy of author
As the child of organically inclined parents who believed in gardening for pleasure and sustenance, my interest in natural landscapes started early. Inspired by Maine homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing, the authors of the seminal book Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, my parents grew and very much relied on a large vegetable garden to help keep us fed. My mother also loved perennial flowers and cultivated a variety of them, just for the fun of it. Some of those plants, like Coreopsis and Liatris, were my first introduction to meadow plants, and are still very much in my life.
My parents taught me you don’t need synthetic chemicals to grow healthy food and flowers. From them I learned that the success of a garden begins and ends with the quality of your soil. We turned the food scraps and garden waste we collected into compost, and used it to cultivate the dark, loamy soil in which we grew our carrots, broccoli, peas, and beans. I remember the smell of it; the rich, soft soil exuded an aroma that made me feel like the earth itself was exhaling.
By the time I graduated from high school I knew I wanted to spend my life outside, growing gardens and landscapes. Setting up a landscape design business shortly after college seemed like a logical next step. I planned landscapes that fit in with the surrounding environment, and don’t need watering, fertilizers, or herbicides once established. It didn’t take long to realize that if I truly wanted to build sustainable landscapes, I’d have to learn how to grow a meadow. Back in the late 1990s, when I started my practice, most people had no interest in getting rid of their green grass. When the topic of lawns came up in client meetings, it was usually a request to install one, which I’d decline. I remember how frustrating it was not to be able to point out a meadow—there just weren’t any local examples. If people had seen the one I visited on trips to Storm King Art Center in Cornwall, New York, where it grew among the large sculptures, or had a chance to take in the simple beauty of a hayfield in full bloom, they’d probably have considered planting a meadow of their own.
I didn’t have a meadow to show them, but I could listen to their concerns. Most people I met complained about the time and money involved in maintaining a lawn, so I told them established meadows need none of the watering, chemicals, or fossil fuels that lawns do.
All they need to thrive, I said, is a half day of sunshine. To those who were tired of their lawn, but not sure they were ready to part with it, I suggested they keep some turf for playspace or pathways. Preserving a little lawn won’t interrupt the integrity of your meadow, nor its ability to serve as a hangout for butterflies and ladybugs.
In those early days of talking up meadows, I won over very few converts. My meadow-building efforts only gained traction after I’d managed to actually plant a few. Most people had to see for themselves the year-round multi-hued grace of a meadow, and its lively population of wild things.
These days people still like hearing about the low-maintenance demands of a meadow. But I’m finding an audience increasingly receptive to a meadow’s regenerative powers, which are all the more compelling when compared to the turf that meadows can replace.
HOW MEADOWS STORE CARBON
About half of all carbon released into the atmosphere every year is absorbed by the planet’s oceans, plants, and soil. While most studies focus on the carbon-storing powers of oceans and forests, the research on grasslands finds they’re a cost-effective and scalable solution for carbon absorption. Given how long it takes for trees to grow, meadows can perform as well as or better than a forest when it comes to sequestering carbon underground.
Plants help the soil store carbon through the process of photosynthesis. Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They exhale the oxygen but retain the carbon molecule, which they use to create the starches and sugars they feed on. Through their roots, they share some of that carbon-based food with organisms living in the soil, such as mycelium and microbes. Those organisms absorb the carbon and when they die, it remains in the soil.
Grasslands hold about 20 percent of global carbon stocks, according to Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that assesses climate solutions. In one study, North American grasslands were found to store between four and a half and forty tons of carbon per acre—and that’s just in the top twenty centimeters of soil. In another, the soil under two and a half acres of healthy prairie was found to have absorbed as much carbon as what 150 cars emit over the course of a year. Perhaps most importantly for anyone considering swapping a lawn for a meadow, an established meadow is able to store 70 percent more carbon than a monocrop, like turfgrass.
The way meadows pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store carbon underground will be familiar to anyone who ever studied basic plant biology: photosynthesis. This is the process by which plants absorb carbon dioxide and sunlight to create their own food, in the form of glucose and other sugars. Oxygen is a byproduct of this process. After the plant exhales oxygen back into the air, it synthesizes sugars using the carbon and combining it with other molecules, like hydrogen taken from water. These carbon-based sugars are what give plants the energy to grow.
Over the course of a meadow plant’s life, a significant amount of the carbon it converts from a gaseous to a solid state ends up in the soil. Some of those carbon-rich sugars created by a plant are sent to its root system, where the plant uses them to attract and feed beneficial microbes, bacteria, and fungi. In exchange, those organisms make available nutrients that nourish the plants. When the organisms die, they leave behind carbon, which remains in the soil for as long as it’s undisturbed. This carbon cycle explains how a meadow, with its many and varied deep-rooted perennials, becomes a very effective carbon sink.
Meadows won’t ask much of you on their way to becoming eco-superstars. Perennial meadow grasses and flowers are deep-rooted and opportunistic, which means they can adapt to poor soil and tough growing conditions. Without much input, if any, they can reclaim tired, near-ruined soil by adding organic matter in the form of decomposing plants and soil organisms. The ability to make do in less-than-perfect conditions makes their soil-building powers even more impressive, and useful.
We love our lawns, but apart from the most unapologetic and passionate lawn enthusiasts, I’m convinced many of us could easily fall in love with meadows given the chance to stand in one, or watch one grow. If we do, we’ll see the dried-out look of a late summer lawn replaced by a richly textured, ever-shifting colorscape. And we’ll hear the roar of lawn mowers fall silent so the sound of chirping birds and crickets can rise up and be heard, and we all get to breathe a little easier.
About the Author:
Owen Wormser received a degree in landscape architecture in 1998. Shortly after that he founded a landscape design/build company and since then he has designed and installed hundreds of landscapes influenced by his ongoing study of horticulture, permaculture, organic agriculture, and ecology.
Owen is the principal at Abound Design, which provides design and installation services with a focus on creating sustainability, regeneration, and beauty. In 2016, he co-founded a nonprofit, Local Harmony, that initiates and installs local regenerative projects built entirely with volunteers and community support. His first book, Lawns Into Meadows, Growing a Regenerative Landscape, was released in 2020. A newly revised second edition of Lawns Into Meadows was released in the fall of 2022.
