Coastal Meadow
Forty years of lawn, replaced by something that belongs here
The owners had inherited a lawn that had been mown, fed and watered in the same rectangle since the 1980s. It was brown for a third of the year and green for the rest only because of a great deal of water.
They asked for something that felt like the hills behind the house: loose, moving, alive with insects — but still legible as a garden from the kitchen window.
★★★★★
“It is the first garden we have had that looks better in year three than it did on day one.”
The challenge
A lawn fighting its own climate
The garden was a flat rectangle of cool-season turf on a wind-exposed coastal slope — brown by August, waterlogged by January, and consuming more irrigation than the rest of the property combined.
Our solution
A meadow with structure
We stripped the turf, decompacted and amended the soil, and planted a layered palette of native grasses, yarrow, sage and coast buckwheat through a decomposed granite path system. Structure comes from clipped evergreen mounds so the garden reads as designed rather than neglected in winter.
Project results
- 74%
- reduction in irrigation demand
- 9 mo
- of continuous flowering each year
- 38
- native species in the planting palette
- 7 wk
- from lawn removal to final planting
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