Park Your Mower
Vanessa Gardner Nagel, APLD
Author of ‘Understanding Garden Design’
http://seasonsgardendesign.com
Last year I attended the APLD Conference in Dallas. There were several gardens with large swathes of soft, low grasses that made a big impression on me - big enough to come home to the Pacific Northwest and translate the last of my three lawn circles into something similar. (see the last two photos below from Dallas.) The other two circles had already become a crop circle and a circle of herbaceous variegated Carex. With apologies to John Greenlee for mentioning it in a talk he gave at our Pasadena Conference in 2008, I decided to create a blue meadow.
We dug out the lawn that was there and sent it to the compost pile. Then we dug in an 80% compost/20%quarter-ten gravel mix into the native clay soil creating a mound at the center. On top of that I added a product used by the athletic field industry called ‘Turface’. This added another layer of drainage. I ordered about six flats of blue-green Carex flacca plugs and went to work. I planted them approximately 15” on center into a 22 foot diameter circle. That was last September. During the first week in December I crawled around on top of that entire circle and planted 800 bulbs. There are 400 Camassia leicthlinii and 400 Allium caeruleum – both blue flowering bulbs that bloom about the end of May and into June. I had the coldest knees I can ever recall.
This spring was one long, cold, wet spring. The grass had grown like Topsy, but the bulbs were taking their sweet time showing up. In the attached images you’ll see the circle immediately after planting, then in May with the Camassia, July with the Allium and then just a couple of weeks ago looking towards the other circles. In one year, those little plugs have completely filled in the space. The Carex will stay low and we don’t need to cut it unless we want to. We’ll have to keep it edged to stay within the circle, but then we had to do that with the lawn. Now this is our lawn and we parked our mower.
