The earth’s autumn and winter colours in the GRASSES of a Mid-Atlantic meadow
Sarah Abraham
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 (Schizachyriumscoparium) 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**
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.
