Kestrel Hill Meadow

The owners were mowing half an acre they never used and watering it to keep it green enough to mow. They wanted it gone — but replaced with something designed, not abandoned. The line that stuck from our first walk-through: 'wild, but on purpose.'

We designed a matrix meadow: fountain grass and little bluestem as the fabric, with drifts of coneflower, sedum and mountain mint stitched through in groups of thirty and fifty — big enough to read from the house, generous enough to feed everything that flies.

Mown grass paths curve through at exactly one mower's width, which is the whole maintenance plan for the paths. The meadow itself is cut once, in March, and left standing all winter — the frost season is a feature, not an afterthought.

Four weeks, most of it ground preparation — the difference between a meadow and a weed field is what happens before planting. We stripped the turf, exhausted the weed seed bank under tarps, then set 4,800 plugs in a fortnight with a crew of five.