Meadow Flowers

One day in the summer of 2002 as I mowed my lawn I got to thinking. Each time I mowed it I would stop for any toads or snakes I saw in the grass, but that there were just too many grasshoppers, bees and other insects to be able to save them all as I chopped up their habitat.

All of a sudden maintaining a lawn like that seemed to be a very odd thing for a vegetarian to do.

I decided that I would instead maintain the lawn as a short plant habitat, allowing the clover which made up the vast bulk of the yard to grow unhindered for most of the season along with whatever other random assortment of plants managed to take seed. Once per year, when the flowering season is through, I'll brush-hog it to keep out any tree seedlings and hopefully keep it as a short plant field while the meadow down below supports the taller plants. I'm kind of new to trying to maintain something like this, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed and will have to see how it goes.

This seems like a win-win-win situation all around. My neighborhood animals get a more constant habitat; I'm not feeling bad about repeatedly churning their environment, running them off or possibly killing them; I'm not maintaining a lawn mower, paying for its fuel or polluting the air as I run it; and I'm saving myself a couple of dozen hours of mowing time over the course of the growing season.

Below are photographs of the many wildflowers that now grow in my yard and meadow. I've tried to identify them as best I could, relying heavily on the National Audubon Society's Field Guide to Wildflowers. If you stumbled on to this site while searching for photographs of a particular flower, don't count on my identification being accurate. Notably absent is a common Vermont sight, Tiger Lilies. I love those flowers, I'll have to throw down some seed. I also have found growing along the roadside in my town Purple-Flowering Raspberry, Chicory, Joe-Pye Weed, Blue Vervain, Canadian Thistle, Snowberry, Spreading Dogbane, Steeplebush, Purple Loosestrife, Moneywort and Yellow Wood Sorrel. There are also three different plants with very small, densely clustered white flowers, and a purple or white and purple ball of small four-petaled flowers that are escaping identification. Hmm. Of those, I know that at least Purple Loosestrife is a exotic invasive species, I should find out about the rest before I encourage their reproduction.