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Introduction
This book is a little bit different from run of the mill gardening and planting design books. It’s about utilizing an understanding of how naturally occurring plant communities function ecologically, and then transferring this understanding to help design, establish, and manage visually dramatic herbaceous vegetation in gardens, urban parks, and other urban greenspaces that is long persistent, given simple low-intensity maintenance. What’s more, the book largely focuses on achieving this not through planting, but through sowing designed seed mixes. Planting is used as an embellishment but is not the main game.

The information in this book is derived from more than 30 years of university research mostly at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. I describe how to produce meadows in ways that provide a substantial measure of control over the outcomes—not far, in fact, from the control you get with planting. Add on 20 years of applying these techniques to practice in a large number of prestigious projects, and you sort of have this book.

The vegetation discussed in this book is sometimes a facsimile of a naturally occurring plant community but generally not. More often it is an eclectic mixture of species drawn from parallel habitats around the world, resorted to create designed cultural plant communities that flower and look dramatic for much longer than most naturally occurring plant communities. This longer flowering season benefits native animals as well as people. The vegetation is, however, always naturalistic, in that it has the visual patterns and rhythms found in semi-natural vegetation. It is also party to the same ecological processes that are inherent in semi-natural vegetation, as these processes are blind to the species present and their origins.

Prior to the development of highly intensive, fossil fuel–dependent industrial agriculture in the 20th century, flower-rich, meadow-like vegetation was much more abundant in human-settled landscapes. A visit to the low-intensity, more traditionally farmed meadow landscapes of the European Alps, or indeed almost any temperate mountain region, provides potent insight into what lowland areas once looked like and how such flowery vegetation was both aesthetically and economically important to agricultural societies. Remarkably accurate meadow depictions in medieval paintings and tapestries, such as “The Hunt of the Unicorn” (1495–1505), suggest that flower-rich meadows were highly valued for both their aesthetic and utilitarian qualities, such as the production of hay to keep livestock alive over winter.

The process of loss began in earnest in the 18th century with the use of clover to boost nitrogen in soils and the evolution of cultivation machinery that makes it much easier to plough up meadow vegetation. The invention of granular, manufactured fertilizers that make it cheap and easy to boost growth at the end of the 19th century and herbicides that allow the elimination of undesired plants in the 20th century are the final coup de grace. The subsequent elimination of flower-rich vegetation happened almost everywhere in the world, but to different degrees, depending on the affluence and ambition of the society in question. In many parts of Eastern Europe, for example, lowland flower-rich meadows are still common, as the traumatic political and economic events of the 20th century, two world wars, the remaking of nation states, and 50 years of communism froze agricultural development in time. Low-intensity traditional practices persisted long after they did in more affluent Western Europe, much to the benefit of meadows.

In the United States, one of the most extensive and in many ways most iconic of the world’s flower-rich, meadow-like vegetation, the prairie, has been almost entirely eliminated and replaced by monoculture. The rapidity and thoroughness of this process and the immensity of the areas over which this transformation took place from the 19th century on are truly staggering. We know from contemporary accounts that even those who might later conspire to plough up prairie were astonished by its beauty and majesty. Patches survive across the American Midwest, often when some local visionary or romantic argued for keeping a piece of what the landscape had once been. The emerging commodity market economy in the west led to the destruction of the prairie. The Soviet Union did the same to its flower-rich steppes in the 20th century through collectivization. Two different economic agendas, but the same net result.

There is at least anecdotal evidence of the creation of meadow-like planting in gardens from the medieval period through a process known as enamelling. This involved closely planting small-flowering plants such as dianthus and primula hybrids in hand-clipped lawn grass to create a neat meadow-like flower border. This idea of herbaceous plants being deliberately planted in and emerging out of managed grass comes again to the fore as more ecological gardening in the 19th century, particularly in central Europe (Germany and what is now the Czech Republic), for example, where in the latter it is known as květnice.

In the English-speaking world, this approach was also championed by William Robinson and represented in his 1870 book The Wild Garden, although it seems likely that he borrowed these ideas from what he had seen during trips to continental Europe. The grass around groups of planted herbaceous plants is mown occasionally during the growing season to control grass vigour and to prevent it from outcompeting the planted species. This seems to work, but it produces a somewhat bizarre landscape appearance, quite different to what a semi-natural meadow looks like.