Creating gardens

We've had a lot of fun creating garden space in our "low-maintenance" landscape in the mountains.

sedum beds, perennial meadow, and raised beds for vegetables

Hmm. We couldn't help but plant natives below the slope, establish raised beds for my vegetables, and work on a meadow/perennial bed in front (not to mention the sedum bed, hemlocks, rhododendrons, and others).  It's becoming a landscape that's fun and rewarding.

Meadow gardens and perennial borders

The difference between meadows and perennial borders is, perhaps, a matter of scale, with the mix of plants a key to their look and feel.  Perennial borders can look quite meadow-like, at least in our vision of them,  while our 'front meadows' are probably more like exuberant perennial beds than true meadows, which include many grasses.

But I think the key is the mix of flowering perennials, whether they have large showy flowers or the reduced flowers of grasses;  this mix determines how the border/meadow feels and looks (in the garden).  A cottage garden is largely flowering perennials without grasses; a meadow includes a majority of grasses as the matrix.

Front 'meadow' in Asheville

But a sparser front planting bed, in the process of becoming more complex, feels like a meadow in progress, too.