The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee :: Fine Gardening, July 11, 2010

I couldn't wait to get my hot little hands on The American Meadow Garden: Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn (Timber Press) written by grass and meadow madman John Greenlee, and seductively photographed by Saxon Holt. The book promised tools for my landscape architect's bag of tricks-philosophical reassurance, design inspiration, a new palette of plants, how-to details.

I just read it. It delivered.
Trade In Your Old Lawn...
You know I'm no fan of traditional lawns. They're stultifyingly boring and often serve no useful purpose-anybody seen the neighborhood kids playing in the front yard lately? They consume too much stuff and foul our precious nest. NASA photos put the collective national lawn at upward of 30 million acres. We can get by with a lot less.

John Greenlee is a dynamo of energy and passion when it comes to ornamental grasses. I won't take up space with his bio. It's all in the book, starting with John's childhood memories of "the field", the only wild space in his SoCal cookie-cutter neighborhood.

John doesn't insist that everyone plow up their existing landscapes and blanket the continent with meadows, but he does make a compelling argument for meadow gardens in more landscapes.

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Masses of Grasses :: Edhat August 1, 2010

Gimme grasses. Gimme blades of green, gold, silver, striped, speckled, ghostly gray, purple. Grasses that fury in the wind and nod in the rain. Enchanted grasses that capture first and last light of day. Grasses of every size: ground cover types to walk on, giants to get lost in.

Grasses fit into every style of garden from Tarzan-meets-Gilligan's-Island-tropical to Muffin-Mouse-cottage.

And the flowers! No, not like your great granny's geraniums, all lipstick red and showy. I'm talking about delicate, smoky puffs of soft purple, or stiff, quaking stalks that sound like a prairie rattler.

Use them in big drifts or pop just one into a perennial bed for an explosion of contrast. Group different types of grasses together to create tapestries of subtle color shifts, or mash them up for high-contrast impact.

Get the idea? You need some ornamental grasses in your garden. If you find that when you're done reading this article, your pulse has quickened (or you've overflowed your drool cup) get these books (preferably at a local independently owned book store): Grasses-Versatile Partners for Uncommon Garden Design by Nancy J Ondra (Storey Books), and The Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses, by John Greenlee (Rodale Press).

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