She was in a poodle skirt, handing me stacks of plans and saying, ALL these landscapers gave me plans! All I want is a meadow, a few orchard trees and some goats to come by occasionally to eat the weeds and grass!

She wanted a vision, not sketch with turf lines or pipe routes.

So yesterday, after a cool and fun design process, Andy Adams (carpenter) and Jefferson Hubble (mason) and I were doing our stuff.

A grassy plain with a double track, meant to look like a donkey cart path winds to the front door. Stuff grows out of the middle of that. A pergola of rough sawn cypress, is complete with cypress trees we harvested from the swamp. The planting—hundreds of grasses, tiny bulbs and seeded in toadflax & lettuce with mulch of car-pulverized leaves we raked off the neighborhood streets.

A dog walker stopped to evaluate, are you going to leave it like that? Well, yes sir, let me explain and interpret.

It’s basically a perennial border. A border of grass (or is that grasses) yes, but the ideas are the same. Things will have to be weeded, cut back and divided.

Tough, Colorful Perennials (outside of grass)

If it were my place, I’d add lots of tough perennials for color and contrast. That would change the vision, so we won’t do it. But if it were mine…

Here’s a list of tough, interesting perennials that I’d include in a meadow-like planting, or any perennial border where you don’t want to do much in the way of dividing, fertilizing, watering etc. Time to plant all of these now!

You can find these in great garden centers:

Aster Jane Bath
Boehemeria Kogan Mushi
Chrysanthemum (about 12 varieties)
Crinum asiaticum Alans White
Echeandia texensis
Patrina scabiosiflia
Thalia geniculata