Lawns Into Meadows: Growing a Regenerative Landscape

Landscape designer Owen Wormser explains how to replace the deadscape we call lawn with low-maintenance, eco-friendly meadows. In this second edition of his award-winning book, he includes photos of meadows in progress plus more ways to cultivate your own organic meadow.

This how-to book on growing your own wildflowers and native grasses is also about sustainability, regeneration, and beauty. In a world where lawns have wreaked havoc on our natural ecosystems, meadows offer a compelling solution. It is garden landscaping that is beautiful, all year round.

Meadows establish wildlife and pollinator habitats, are low-maintenance and low-cost, have a built-in resilience that helps them weather climate extremes, and can draw down and store far more carbon dioxide than any manicured lawn.

Wormser describes how to plant an organic meadow garden or traditional meadow, that’s right for your site. His book includes guidance on:

Preparing your site
Designing your meadow
Planting without using synthetic chemicals
Growing 21 starter native grasses and wildflowers, including butterfly weed, smooth blue aster, purple coneflower, wild bergamot, blue grama grass, switchgrass, and many more
Building support in neighborhoods where a tidy lawn is the standard.

He also shares 28 color photos that highlight the multitude of ways you can cultivate your own organic meadow.

To illuminate the many joys of meadow-building, Wormser draws on his own stories, including how growing up off the grid in northern Maine, with no electricity or plumbing, prepared him for his work.