Author:Sara Tangren

How to Make a Meadow in Maryland: Steps for Year 1

Maryland Grows19 Comments

Many Maryland gardeners would like to try planting a native meadow. It’s a great alternative to lawn care, and better for water quality, the climate, native plants, and pollinators.

A planted native meadow at the University of Maryland Arboretum.
A planted native meadow at the University of Maryland Arboretum.

People who set out on their first meadow making project face a set of common challenges:

  • They underestimate how much labor is involved in creating and maintaining a meadow, so they start with a project that is much too large for them.
  • They are not familiar with the plants native to a Maryland meadow, which ones to choose, what they look like throughout their life cycles, and there are no good resources for them to turn to for this information.
  • They purchase seeds from distant seed vendors because locally native seeds are not commercially available, which decreases chances of project success and makes their project less beneficial to the environment.
  • They lack the expertise needed to successfully order and use native seeds. It’s not like working with other garden seeds!
  • When it comes time to remove weeds, they can’t tell the native plants from the weeds. You can’t maintain a meadow if you don’t know what the good guys look like!

The conventional approach to meadow projects requires an investment of hundreds or even thousands of dollars in seeds, supplies, and equipment, not to mention weeks of labor. Yet, in our experience, most Marylanders who undertake a meadow project experience disappointment and failure in the end.

In this blog, we offer an alternative for beginning meadow-makers, a modular meadow approach. Using this approach, you will create a small, pilot meadow using plugs purchased from local native plant producers. During the first year, you will plant your new meadow, then study the plants, becoming familiar with their needs and their appearance throughout the seasons. In the second year, you will have one successful project under your belt. You can decide whether to expand the meadow or not, and you will be making that decision based upon a wealth of knowledge and understanding of the resources required vs. what you have to devote. Continue reading →

Post Oaks in the Big City

Maryland Grows8 Comments
Post oak
This post oak thrives despite being squeezed between a parking lot and a sidewalk. November 2013. Takoma Park, MD.

If you live in one of Maryland’s older towns, you probably have a lot of heritage trees – native trees inherited from the forests and fields that existed before your town was built out. It’s part of what gives old towns so much character. In my home town, Takoma Park, one of the heritage trees I admire the most is the post oak (Quercus stellata).

Post oaks inspire me. I see beauty in their shiny, cruciform leaves and their tiny, striped acorns. I also admire the species’ capacity to cope with adversity.  Many of the post oaks in Takoma Park are confined to little hell strips, those narrow grassy areas between slabs of asphalt or concrete. There they must cope with soil compaction, deicing salts, copious quantities of dog urine, and the urban heat island, to name a few.

Post oaks are one of the most common trees at Soldier’s Delight Natural Area, where the serpentinite bedrock gives rise to a soil so laden with heavy metals that it’s too toxic for most plants to grow in. Perhaps tolerance of metals helps the post oak perform well at urban sites,  even sites near train tracks and in industrial parks. Continue reading →