Growing Green / John Greenlee : Meadow Man : Inspired by boyhood hikes in the mountains, a Pomona nurseryman cultivates ‘natural lawns’ that use sedges instead of traditional turf grass.
Since the last big California drought from 1988 to 1993, lots of people have wondered if it was possible to replace that monotonous, consumptive contrivance called a lawn. After all, that bright green lawn is a carry-over from wetter English and East Coast gardens. To keep them going in California’s climate requires water, fertilizer, and a weekly mow and blow by noisy, polluting machines.
Although some adventurous gardeners have tried lawn substitutes such as yarrow, a perennial herb, only one gardener I can think of has actually planted no-mow meadows that might someday rival lawns in popularity.
Horticulturist John Greenlee of Pomona has planted a number of what he calls “natural lawns” and meadows. He recently supplied the meadow plants for the new garden at the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena. This naturalistic design by Santa Monica designer Nancy Goslee Power opens to the public Oct. 2.
Greenlee, 44, is a genuine grass guru, having literally written the book on the subject, “The Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses” (Rodale, 1992), although nowadays he may be better known as one of the hosts on the HGTV series “Grow It!” and the new “Way to Grow” on the same cable network. He also runs a wholesale nursery of grasses and grass-like plants, such as sedges.
At this point, nothing yet rivals an ordinary grass lawn for cheaply covering ground. Seed and sod are readily available and relatively inexpensive, and just about anyone can care for a grass lawn.
But the meadow idea is promising. When a client asked landscape architect Raymond Hansen of San Diego for meadow-like areas in his new Hermosa Beach garden, Hansen consulted with Greenlee.
“Greenlee’s meadow plants have a soft and natural quality that isn’t found in other landscape forms,” Hansen said. “And hopefully they’ll have lower maintenance requirements as well.”
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Greenlee became interested in grasses and meadows as a kid growing up in Orange County. He mowed lawns on weekends and spent summers in the San Bernardino Mountains at Camp Ahwahnee with Brea Boy Scout Troop 1. As an Eagle Scout, then as a counselor teaching the nature badges, it was hard to miss the dramatic contrast between the barren, newly planted Orange County gardens he mowed, and the lush and varied mountain meadows he hiked through.
Greenlee figures he made up his mind then--that he preferred naturalistic meadows over neatly mowed lawns--but it would take awhile for him to figure out how to actually plant a bona fide meadow in a backyard. After earning a degree in ornamental horticulture from Cal Poly Pomona in 1978, he first worked as a landscape contractor and in 1980 started a landscape design and installation firm, John Greenlee & Associates.
It was while he was working on a big residence in San Marino with German-born nurseryman Kurt Blumel that he planted his first mostly grass garden.
The Baltimore-based Blumel was just about the only one in this country commercially growing what are called “ornamental” grasses, as opposed to turf grasses. Ornamental grasses are nearly wild grasses that you don’t mow (though they may need cutting back like a perennial). They’re pretty and wavy, and have handsome seed heads in late summer and fall.
Most are too tall to walk or romp on, so they’re used as smallish landscape plants--usually as accents--and rarely as meadow-makers. At the San Marino residence, they were used to form a big, billowy meadow under native oaks that surrounded a starkly contemporary house by architect John Galbraith.
“It was supposed to look like a California savanna 300 years ago,” Greenlee said.
Strictly ornamental grasses had been popular in northern Europe gardens for quite a while. Washington, D.C.-based designers Oehme, van Sweden & Associates were doing landscapes of ornamental grasses on America’s East Coast. But the nearly 1-acre residence in San Marino had at one time the second-largest grass garden in this country. Generally, ornamental grass gardens are tall and meant to be looked at, not walked on.
Since there was no West Coast source, the grasses had to be hauled from Baltimore in a semi, and that was when Greenlee realized a grass nursery was needed out here. He also started to plant grasses and grass-like plants in his own home garden next to the nursery to see which grew best in our Mediterranean climate.
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In 1985, Greenlee Nursery was started in a semi-rural part of Pomona, and Greenlee began the serious study of grasses.
“There was virtually no serious research on ornamental grasses.” he said. “If cows couldn’t eat it or you couldn’t whack a ball on it, nobody in the university system was interested in studying it.”
Slowly but surely, he and a few nursery friends from Texas and the Midwest became more interested in what makes up a meadow than they were in individual ornamental grasses. They could see that if self-sustaining meadows were possible, one might make an attractive and environmentally friendly alternative to the turf lawn.
They began exploring meadows whenever, and wherever, they got the chance, from Mexico to Canada. They called this activity “prairie-doggin’.”
Interestingly enough, as real meadows were prairie-dogged and studied, it became apparent that sedges, not true grasses, made up most of the low-growing, perpetually green ground cover.
Sedges look very much like grasses. However, they seldom or never require mowing and need no fertilizer, and native kinds make do with little water. Most have gracefully arching blades that “feel acceptable between your toes,” according to Greenlee, though they are slightly stiffer with edges that are a little sharper.
“We were in this meadow in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeast Arizona, looking at these short little carexes [sedges] that were still green after all the grasses had dried out and turned brown, thinking, ‘Nobody’s mowing it, nobody’s watering it, but it looks great. So why not make a lawn out of this?’ ” Greenlee recalled.
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And that’s what he’s been experimenting with ever since. Although Greenlee’s sedge meadows have yet to stand the test of time as grass lawns have, he has experimented enough to have a list of favorite lawn sedges (see “Meadow Makers” box). These sedges grow low--3 to 6 inches--so they are easily walked on. They “hold the meadow together,” according to Greenlee, and can actually be mowed like a lawn if you like that tidy look.
He plants them from little plugs spaced about 12 to 18 inches apart, and mows most of the sedges about twice a year, once to remove flower spikes before they mature into seed. Greenlee emphasizes that a key part of establishing such a meadow or sedge lawn is to make absolutely certain all the creeping lawn grasses such as Bermuda and kikiyu have been killed (with Roundup) before beginning so they don’t become enmeshed in the new meadow.
Plant one or two of these low-growers, and you could call it a lawn, mowing it now and again. Mix other sedges and true grasses of varying height, texture and color to get a more varied meadow look. Serious gardeners can treat it like a perennial border, Greenlee said.
“That’s when the fun begins. I plant South African and other Mediterranean bulbs that pop up in it, and wild violets or veronicas that creep through it.”
He sometimes leaves little “divots” where he can plant annual flowers in their season. You can plant all sorts of things in a meadow and rearrange it constantly so you can, in effect, garden in your lawn.
“With a meadow, you can break down the barrier between the lawn and the flower bed,” Greenlee said. “You can walk on the perennial bed instead of just by it. It’s a brave new world.”
Before one gets too excited about the meadow concept, remember that this is a brand-new idea. Although Greenlee supplies many retail nurseries, sedges and some other crucial meadow components are in limited supply, at least until there is more demand. But so were the first microwave ovens.
Robert Smaus can be reached by e-mail at robert.smaus@latimes.com.
