Picture a garden alive with swaying grasses, clouds of wildflowers, and buzzing pollinators: a landscape that looks as though nature designed it herself. English-style naturalistic gardens have become one of the most influential trends in modern gardening, prized for their romantic beauty, biodiversity, and low-maintenance appeal.
In an interview with Birmingham, Alabama–based horticulturist and garden designer Molly Hendry, we explore what defines a naturalistic meadow garden, why the approach is captivating gardeners, and how homeowners across the United States can adapt the look using plants suited to their own climate and region.
Meet the Expert: Molly Hendry
“While I do have a degree in both horticulture and landscape architecture, I have always felt the most important aspect of my background was being a little girl who spent her days playing in the wild woods of Alabama,” says Molly. “Those magical childhood romps spent outside using my imagination would one day lead me into a career at the intersection of plants and design. Studying garden design has taken me all over the world, including spending 10 months in the UK working in public gardens across England and Scotland as the Royal Horticultural Society Interchange Fellow. This experience really informed my belief that truly great gardens are born not only from a clear design vision but also from the hands of skilled gardeners over time.”
What Is a Naturalistic Meadow Garden?
“A naturalistic planting takes a wild reference point, like a native woodland or a meadow, and uses them as inspiration in a garden setting,” says Molly. However, these designs are not a copy and paste of what you would find in the wild! Instead, they take the qualities (textures, colors, seasonal themes, and diversity) and distill and amplify them to create the effects that wild places give us.
Why English Gardens Continue to Influence Garden Design Around the World
Molly says, “England is so well known for its gardens because they have a rich legacy of garden styles and deep seeded cultural appreciation for gardening. Although England’s colonial conquests have ceased, one thing that has endured is their ability to take species from all over the world and weave them into the fabric of their own gardens through the centuries. In modern garden design in England, this has manifested in the rise of naturalistic style planting both in private gardens and public spaces.”
The English Garden Designers and Historic Landscapes That Inspired Molly
“I am a very experiential learner, so I have been really impacted by specific internships I have completed,” says Molly. “The first time I worked in a more wild garden was the summer I spent at Winterthur in Delaware. This garden was created by Henry Francis DuPont and was deeply influenced by William Robinson’s book The Wild Garden. I fell in love with the ever-changing woodland layers, the meadows that wrapped the garden, and how we were able to take our cue from nature and amplify it in a garden setting. This internship also taught me that a garden is a lot like a friendship. It is a relationship that isn’t defined by one moment, but thousands of moments over time!”
“The other designer that has really influenced me is Nigel Dunnet, who I had the honor of working with for two months in Sheffield during my RHS Interchange Fellowship. As I sat in on his classes and visited his plantings all over the UK. This experience really showed me that we can have dynamic, layered ecological plantings in our public spaces and our home gardens, we just have to rethink our posture from maintaining a static picture and shift to managing a system in motion.”
Native Plants That Bring Color and Pollinators to Meadow Gardens
Per Molly, “Meadows are a type of grassland, so the backbone of any meadow are grasses! I love to use purple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis), ‘White Cloud’ muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris ‘White Cloud’), and switch grasses (Panicum spp.). While grasses bring structure and movement to a meadow, wildflowers bring the seasonal themes. I love using ‘Blackbeard’ penstemon, coneflowers, rudbeckia, bee balms, Joe pye weed, Jeana Phlox, agastache, and asters to add a rolling chorus of blooms through the growing season!”
How to Keep a Meadow Garden Beautiful in Every Season
Molly says, “The key for having a beautiful meadow throughout all the seasons is to think beyond just flowers and consider fall color, textures, seed heads. For example, ‘Blackbeard’ penstemon has beautiful blush pink to white foxglove-looking flowers in the late spring, but its purple foliage adds a great contrasting element to the meadow through the rest of the summer. The blooms then turn into lovely seed heads by autumn and the foliage will turn a red/orange color that is stunning in the autumn light. Grasses also steal the show in winter and are an important place for insects to overwinter!”
The Biggest Challenge Gardeners Face When Starting a Meadow Garden
“The biggest challenge is getting the meadow established then continuing to manage it as a system in motion,” says Molly. “In traditional suburban design, maintenance centers around holding woody plants in a generally static picture. However, a meadow is a matrix of species that are in constant relationship with each other, which is the exciting part! These plantings are always changing, with new surprises along the way. The challenge facing American gardeners is to embrace that element of surprise as a delight and continue to stay curious!”
The Surprising Soil Secret Behind Successful Meadow Gardens
According to Molly, “Matching the type of soil to the type of planting is critical to the success of a design! Many gardeners are surprised to learn that meadow plantings often need low soil fertility, because many native meadow plants are stress tolerators. Really fertile soils that are heavily amended will favor competitive weeds. However, if you plant into a low-fertility soil that is more sandy and gritty, the native wildflowers thrive without the threat of competition.”
Can You Create a Meadow Garden in a Small Yard?
Luckily, Molly says, “You can definitely create a meadow garden in a small suburban yard! While larger landscapes have the ability to impress from sheer scale, smaller meadow plantings have the ability to impress with immersion in the layers and details.”
How to Make a Meadow Garden Look Intentional, Not Messy
Molly says, “The key to creating an intentional meadow is having an ‘orderly frame.’ This cues the eye that there is intention! The orderly frame could be something as simple as a mown edge or corten steel edging. It could also be more defined like a chopped stone border or a stone wall. The goal is to give definition and intention to the edges of the wild! The other element that helps is having contrast so that there are discernible drifts of different species. Having contrasting colors, textures, and only a few species that steal the show in each season allows the eye to see patterns and see intention behind the planting.”
How Much Maintenance Does a Meadow Garden Really Need?
“A meadow will require different amounts of management throughout the years,” according to Molly. The first two to three years are key for establishing the meadow as the plants mature and grow to cover the ground completely. There will inevitably be weeds that want to pop up either from the soil seed bank or are brought in by the wind or birds. But once the ground is completely covered with the plants you do want, the management really centers around seasonally tidying and a late-winter cutback before the spring flush! More aggressive species, like mountain mints, might need to be kept in check or divided over the years to make sure they aren’t taking over!
How to Prevent Weeds From Taking Over a Meadow Garden
The best tool for preventing weed invasion is covering the ground with plants you want, says Molly. It is important to not just think about the blooms of the plants that make up your meadow, but also the form in which they grow. Ground covers like sedges, green and gold, moss phlox, and plantain-leaf pussytoes are helpful tools to cover the ground and prevent weed seeds from being able to germinate.
Why Meadow Gardens Use Less Water Than Traditional Lawns
Molly says an emphatic “Yes!” “Because native species that are used in meadows are stress-tolerating plants, once they are established they require very little water. Their roots go much deeper than grasses used in traditional lawns, so they can subsist much longer in drought conditions and rebound after difficult years, where traditional lawns and flower beds will not.”
Follow Molly on Instagram and visit her website, Roots & Ramblings.
