01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 24, 2008

By Virginia A. Smith

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Patricia Cregan, of Huntingdon Valley, Pa., in her meadow in the back of her home, which was planted with native wildflowers.

PHILADELPHIA When Patricia and Conrad Cregan moved from Bustleton, Pa., to Huntingdon Valley, Pa., in 1984, the new house came with 1 1/3 acres and a John Deere lawn tractor.

They were delighted: “We wanted more land,” says Patricia.

They got it, along with a heavy-duty lawn-care regimen shared by millions of Americans. But by 2004, the watering, weeding, fertilizing and mowing had gotten old. And Patricia, by then a volunteer at nearby Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust, had learned about an alternative to the royal-family-style lawn.

She suggested to her un-outdoorsy husband, “Why don’t we rip up the backyard and plant a meadow?”

Sounds so easy, so carefree.

And how romantic is this? Every spring, the meadow rolls out a rainbow: first violets, then lavender and Indian paintbrush, yellow coreopsis and orange butterfly weed, purple coneflower and bee balm, black-eyed Susans and goldenrod.

All this and more, dotted with native grasses, everything shimmering in the sun, bending in the breeze and offering year-round beauty and food and shelter to the all-important “3 B’s” — bees, birds and butterflies.

“A meadow for all seasons,” Cregan calls it.

Converting traditional lawn to meadow isn’t a snap, though. It takes planning and three or four years to mature. It’s much more complicated than tossing seeds into the air, despite the tease of “meadow-in-a-can” wildflower mixes.

And while keeping watch over a meadow can be less trouble than maintaining the perfect lawn, it isn’t carefree. Cregan must be vigilant or her meadow, now in its fourth full season, will be overtaken by aggressive, nonnative weeds.

“It’s relatively difficult for these invasives to get established once the meadow is dense and thick,” says David J. Robertson, executive director of the Pennypack trust, which offers free meadow consultations to the public, “but until then, the seeds can be in the ground already. And when they’re disturbed, they start taking off.”

Birds spread those seeds. So do deer.

Cregan’s monitoring of Japanese stilt grass, Oriental bittersweet, Canada thistle, mile-a-minute and porcelain berry vines follows a process begun by Brian G. O’Neill of Weeds Inc. in Aston in the spring of 2004.

Step 1 was getting rid of the grass and tilling the soil. “We nuked the whole backyard with Roundup,” says O’Neill, who returned twice to apply a preemergent herbicide to prevent annual weed seeds from germinating in the newly cleared space. Cregan now yanks the weeds by hand.

“Once your grasses are established, you’ll be under control,” O’Neill says, referring to warm-season grasses that are a big part of a successful meadow mix.

Like the wildflowers, Cregan’s grasses are native to the Northeastern United States. They include big and little bluestem, purpletop, fox sedge, and bottlebrush, which are desirable because they grow slowly, clump nicely, and tolerate drought and different soils.

And how beautiful they are.

As we walk the mossy path, grasses on either side rustle in the warm breeze. We remark upon the bluestems’ skinny, blue-green spikes and the aptly named purpletop, with delicate flower wands that lean into the hillside like a gauzy violet mantle.

Two monarch butterflies scoot across our path, as a woodpecker whooshes overhead. The mockingbirds and cicadas are in glorious duet, and the meadow’s literally humming with bees. Can this truly be 2008? It feels like long ago.

Cregan’s meadow, about 3/4 acre, cost about $6,000 and was designed by Larry Weaner Landscape Design of Glenside, Pa. Weaner, who planted his first meadow in 1982, has done about 10 this year, the most ever. Attendance by architects and landscape designers at an annual native-design conference he cosponsors with Morris Arboretum is up, too.

“We had to cut it off at 200 this year,” Weaner says, up from 130 in 2007 and just 70 a few years earlier.

His clients span New Hampshire to North Carolina, and they convert an average of two to three acres to meadow “to have something that’s both ecological and aesthetically pleasing.

“The savings in water, fertilizing and mowing is usually an ancillary thing,” he says. “They’re not doing this to save money.”

After evaluating a site’s soil, conditions and history, the design team chooses appropriate plants. Clients’ desires are also taken into account.

“Occasionally, we hear people say, ‘I hate yellow’ or ‘I want pink,’” says landscape designer Ian Caton of Weaner’s firm, who worked with Cregan.

Meadow designers aim for what Caton calls “a diaspora of different plants and times and places, a sort of knit-together group of plants … to make sure all the bases in the meadow are covered and there isn’t any room for weed seeds to germinate.”

Seeds for the native wildflowers and grasses are favored over more expensive live plants or plugs. By the second year, the black-eyed Susans, coneflower and bee balm are up. Plants like Culver’s root take six or seven years. Grasses, two or three.

Cregan has the meadow mowed low in March and volunteers her husband, himself the volunteer coordinator at the Pennypack trust, to do the edging. Both retired, the couple has six grandchildren, and you might think they’d love this unusual backyard.

But no. They want their sledding hill back. They want to play football.

“You can play on the lawn out front,” their Nahny Patricia tells them.

The deer like the meadow “but no way can they eat everything here,” says Cregan. The red fox brings his vixen a-calling. And every other creature — save the groundhog, knock on wood — seems to be a fan, too.

“It’s a lot of work,” says the meadow’s minder, who has had Lyme disease five times. “There’s never a time you don’t have something to do.”

But sometimes, you need to just be. On those days, says Cregan, “the meadow is food for the soul.”

You don’t need farm-sized acreage to have a wildflower meadow. In fact, says David J. Robertson, executive director of Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust in Huntingdon Valley, “you can do it on any size property.”

Even a border.

Five years ago, Judy Bishop planted black-eyed Susans, goldenrod, fall-blooming asters, and other, mostly native, plants on either side of a 30-foot-long walkway in front of her Jenkintown home.

Everyone else has grass there, but Bishop says, “I don’t agree with lawns for environmental reasons, and I don’t want to mow. It’s kind of a wild look.”

It’s not for everyone. Says Robertson, “You have to keep it properly groomed, especially if you do it in your front yard.”

One way to keep things neat is to make a straight or curvy mowed border, like a picture frame around your plantings.

Starting small with one corner of your lawn eases the transition for your neighbors and costs less than doing the whole project at once.

In April or late summer, take up the sod or kill it, very carefully, with an herbicide like Roundup. Turn the soil over once, allowing weed seeds to sprout, then nuke them or yank by hand. Do this again when they resprout.

Then it’s time to plant.

Choose a variety of native plants and grasses, matching them to the light, moisture, soil and topographical characteristics of your property. Natives are more adaptive to our region and more valuable to wildlife. Avoid the “meadow-in-a-can” route. You’ll get a big flash-in-the-pan the first two years, but even the “regional seed mixes” contain too many annuals and plants that aren’t well-suited to the eastern United States.

Plant densely; weeds love gaps.

Just to be safe, check with your municipality about mowing or weed ordinances. Not everyone appreciates that “wild look.” (Reason enough to put your meadow — or mini-meadow — out back.)

Once you’re up and running, stay on top of the weed thing. And cherish what you’ve created.

“There’s mystery in this kind of landscape,” says Larry Weaner, who installed Patricia Cregan’s meadow in Huntingdon Valley.

You can’t control a meadow, as you would a lawn. And you can’t predict how it will evolve. But even for you Type A’s out there, that should be part of the joy.