Forest evolution: The mown meadow

I had the strange experience recently of running across a photo that looked spookily like a pic of my forest-garden. As in, my garden that doesn’t quite exist yet. I had just days earlier mulched out a sort of peninsula that would tie our biggest birch tree into the fledgling hedgerow along the fence, and planted the newly claimed area with various native plugs. I have a vision of a grassy mown forest-edge meadow with distinctive tree trunks and conifers emerging from the tall grasses, peppered with wildflowers. It was those nascent grasses and wildflowers that I had just planted, having put in the distinctive tree trunks and conifers two years ago, so what I actually had/have was the trees plus mown weed-grass plus mulch, as seen in the pic below. But I could see the future scene vividly in my mind, grasses rustling in the breeze — and then there it was on my screen, atop a Gardenista story about ticks. Not identical, certainly, but so similar to the image in my head that I did a double-take.

After seeing the photo, I decided to start a pinboard with it and others to share with you, but really that one photo is the whole mood. It’s the conifers that make it.

The writer of the story happens to be a friend (Laura Fenton, whose newsletter you would probably like) and when I told her how the pic had struck me, she let me know it was taken at Bryan’s Ground, in England. (Formerly visitable, it appears to have been for sale and in a state of limbo for several years now.) But it came as no surprise that it was British. As much as I love and admire flower-packed British gardens and am always saying that’s nevertheless not what I’m trying to make for myself in this case, they do seem particularly good at the sort of mown woodland-meadow situation I’m wanting to create. It’s a vibe that speaks to me as someone who both grew up in a Plains state and thinks heaven is a forest — the perfect meeting of the two. But it also feels like the right solution from the perspective of the garden. 

In such a small space, my future tiny forest can only ever hint at the forest’s edge, at best, plus I have all this inherited turf grass to deal with. I originally imagined it might eventually all become “forest floor,” shaded out by the trees. And I still like to imagine that someday it will be ferns and woodland plants in place of the grasses. But it might never get all the way there, and even if it does it could take many years. So I’ve been thinking the thing to do with the lawn is to encroach on it with purposefully planted meadow material until what I have is just a mown path running through. Then I made this peninsula and that idea shifted a bit.

Here’s where I’m at: