Lately we’ve been sharing updates on the various garden rooms at Willow Greens Farm—White Garden, Arrival Court, Beech Walk, Croquet Lawn, and so on—and I thought, maybe you’d like to see how all these pieces fit together.
The Big Picture
Let’s start with an aerial view of our 7 acres, courtesy of Google Maps. The red line is the property boundary; we’ll get to those other lines in a minute. The blue pin marks the location of the house. A gravel road runs along the upper boundary line; a busier main road along the left. The first thing you might notice is how close the house is to the gravel road. This was very convenient back in the days of horse-drawn transportation, when the gravel road was the main road. These days it’s subject to a county easement. We’re just happy the gravel road sees very little traffic, and that the house faces the opposite direction with views of open space instead of road.
The barn is to the right of the house, some distance away. The initial plan we developed with a landscape architect led to creation of the Arrival Court and Entry Garden, and inspired additional garden rooms and paths. In the Google Maps view most of the area between the house and barn is obscured by trees, so a diagram would seem to be in order.
The “Floor Plan”
Here, we’re looking at the part of the aerial view between the main road and the yellow line. A long curved driveway runs from the main road, through the Arrival Court, and out to the gravel road. We’ve been planting trees in the area between the driveway and the main road, slowly filling in the open space currently devoted to grass.
Gardens begin at the the house, with the White Garden in back and the Arrival Court in front. The White Garden is a work-in-progress; each season points out new opportunities to add more plants in pursuit of a continuously blooming white aesthetic. On the way from the White Garden to the Beech Walk, you pass walnut trees and hostas on the left, and a 200-year-old Boxwood hedge on the right.
The Entry Garden is on the other side of the Boxwood, with steps leading through the hedge to the Croquet Lawn. Someday, the area just beyond the Beech Walk and Croquet Lawn will be a Woodland Walk; the design is still percolating. And finally, there’s the fenced Kitchen Garden, with the barn and raised beds.
The Meadow
In the Google Maps photo, you’ll see an orange arc that joins with the yellow line. Everything to the right of the orange line is open pasture which, at the time of Google’s last visit, was subject to regular mowing to keep it in livestock-ready condition. Our long-term goal is to rewild the pasture, turning it into a wildlife habitat for everything from pollinators and other invertebrates to birds and mammals. So the first thing we did was stop mowing.
You might think all it takes is bags of wildflower mix from the local garden center. But those seeds don’t stand a chance against the invasive grasses which plague almost any open space. When we visited English gardens last summer, everyone sang the praises of Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus minor) as a “meadow maker.” If tour guides are to be believed, you simply mow the area, sow rattle, and Bob’s your uncle: you have a meadow. As with most quick fixes, it’s not that simple.
For one thing, Yellow Rattle is native to Europe and not to the US. But even so, the area must be prepared first, and with about 4 acres of available land we wanted to do it right. For advice we met with a Virginia Master Gardener who referred us to The Clifton Institute, which takes a research-based approach to habitat restoration. We walked the property together, taking a deeper look at the state of the meadow and scientific approaches to developing this area.
The good news is, we have some warm-season native grasses like Purpletop and Indiangrass. But we also have a fair mount of non-native cool-season pasture grass (Tall Fescue, Timothy Grass, etc.), and there are few wildflowers. Converting to a meadow requires controlling the grasses, in particular the non-native varieties, which out-compete wildflowers. Further reading on the subject showed that preparing the site1 would be at least a three-year process. It’s also a good idea to start with a small segment of the meadow to see what works, rather than tackling it all at once. Poof! Visions of wildflowers vanished into thin air.
Clearly developing a meadow requires vigilance, and isn’t going to happen in just one growing season. This year our time is consumed with maintaining existing garden spaces and building out the new garden rooms. For now, we’ll mow the pasture twice a year to keep the invasive raspberry (Rubus phoenicolasius) at bay, and do our best to curb the equally rampant Japanese Stiltgrass. In our spare time we’ll dream about the recommended species for meadow planting in our region2, and look forward to someday seeing them in our own meadow.
Neal, Cathy. Planting for Pollinators: Establishing a Wildflower Meadow from Seed, University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension.
Recommended Species for Meadow Plantings in Northern Virginia. Virginia Department of Conservation & Recreation, The Clifton Institute, and Virginia Working Landscapes. November 2019.
This was really helpful. I hadn't realised that your barn and kitchen garden were so far from the house, nor had I understood how close to the gravel road the back of the house and the white garden were. Planting a copse by the main road now makes sense, as does the new fence behind the white garden.