This meadow garden was planted in the late 1970s by Pamela Lammot du Pont Copeland (1906-2001, American), the proprietor of Mt. Cuba in Hockessin, DE.  It forms a part of a reserve of flora native to the Piedmont of the eastern US.

 

Photos taken between 2015 and 2025.   (Mt. Cuba Center is closed to the public from late November until the first week of April).

 

 

The meadow is a rectangular field of about two acres which has a marked slope. 

It had been an old farmed field with trees.  All trees were removed except  for a red oak and a native dogwood. 

 

 

The red oak and the native dogwood in September

 

 

The oak tree visible behind the dogwood in early November

 

 

The dogwood,  its leaves seemingly turning to smoke, its trunk deep in grass, in late November

 

 

100,000 follicles of eight kinds of grass were sown. 

 

 

Yellow Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutrans) in late autumn

 

Yellow Indian grass in late summer and early autumn

 

Little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) with its  silvery-white seed tufts in winter

 

Big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) in summer. It grows to 6′.

 

 

The grasses are broom sedge, big and little blue stem, split beard bluestem, tufted hair grass, Indian and love grass, and dropseed; and the pale pink hair-awn muhly in the process of revival from near-extinction.

 

 

 Hair-awn muhly (Muhlenbergia capillaris) growing with a variety of aster in October

Hair-awn muhly with a goldenrod

Hair-awn muhly, listed as ‘extirpated’ in Pennsylvania and endangered in contiguous states, is in a process of revival.

 

Love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis) in autumn

 

Prarie dropseed (Sporobolis heterolepis) in mid November after snow

 

 

30 varieties of wildflowers were also planted.

The grasses predominate by design:  the meadow is weeded; flower seeds are removed to prevent the advance of the flowers into the meadow.  A controlled burn of the meadow was undertaken in the last year for the first time in the life of the meadow.

 

 

Meadow gardeners in October 2020

 

 

A path edges the meadow garden on three sides and the meadow overlaps the path along one edge.

 

 

 

 

The fourth side is guarded by a coven of witch’s brooms of white pine (partly culled in the early 2020s for disease).

Their irregular boughs and dark, somewhat barren understory are a contrast to the light and fecundity of the garden meadow.

 

 

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On warmish days in late Autumn, I sit at one edge of a little peninsula between two lakes installed beneath the meadow garden. 

 

Looking across the larger of the two lakes, I take in the deliquescent colours. 

 

 

At the far end is a little bridge over an outlet of the larger lake. It allows water to run downhill to another small body of water.

 

 

I walk around the lake and over the short bridge to reach the meadow garden.

 

Entrance to the meadow in early autumn

Entrance to the meadow in late autumn 

 

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TO THE GRASS OF AUTUMN

W.S. Merwin, 1927-2019, American

 

You could never believe
it would come to this

one still morning
when before you noticed
the birds already
were all but gone

 

 

even though year upon year
the rehearsal of it
must have surprised
your speechless parents

 

 

The red oak and the leafless native dogwood in November

and unknown antecedents
long ago gathered to dust

 

 

and though even the children
have been taught how to say
the word withereth**

 

 

 

 

 

no you were known to be
cool and countless

 

the bright vision on all

 

the green hills
rippling in unmeasured waves

through the days in flower

 

a variety of goldenrod (Solidago)

Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) 

Hyssop leaf thoroughwart (Eupatorium hyssopifolium)

a form of Bee Balm (Monarda)

Spike Gayfeather (Liatris spicata)

Clustered mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum)

Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Culver’s-Root (Veronicastrum virginicum)

Obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana)

Tall Ironweed (Vernonia angustifolia) in mid-October

Hollow-stem Joe Pyeweed in early autumn

a form of Bee Balm (Monarda)

White false indigo (Baptisia alba)

Blue wood aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium)

 

(through the days in flower)

 

 

now you are as the fog
that sifts among you

 

Broomsedge with the last hurrahs of the black-eyed susans in late autumn

 

 

gray in the chill daybreak
the voles scratch the dry earth
around your roots

 

hoping to find something
before winter

 

Butterfly weed still in seed in late November after an erratic Autumn

 

a view into the meadow in November from the witches’ brooms of white pines

 

 

and when the white air stirs
you whisper to yourselves

 

 

Blue stem and broom sedge in late Autumn

 

without expectation
or the need to know

 

Blue stem after a November snow

 

 

 

 

**withereth = archaic form of ‘withers away’.

Learned in Sunday school as in: “For all  flesh is as grass and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.  The grass withereth and the flower thereof  falleth away”. 1 Peter 1:24 in the King James version of the Bible.