Miriam Goldberger is the author of a new book that is not just informative but absolutely elegant called Taming Wildflowers.

Miriam and her husband Paul Jenkins have been tending the Wildflower Farm in Southern Ontario, Canada since 1988. They also developed Eco-Lawn which is a drought-tolerant, low maintenance turf grass that is grown at homes and businesses across North America.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I have been growing flowers since 1985, 1986, and Wildflower Farm was founded in 1988. I began by being captivated by the process of growing flowers from seed. It originally Wildflower Farm, back in the day it was a dried wildflower farm, then it morphed into Canada’s first pick your own flower farm and I had acres and acres of flowers, annuals and perennials not natives at that time to tend to. I became interested in wildflowers because they were low maintenance, I needed some gardens that weren’t for the pick your owns, that were for display that tended to themselves basically. So I researched the topic and found that perennials; North American Wildflowers and Native Grasses that are such low maintenance! It astounded me! Once they were established, they didn’t need to be watered, they didn’t need to be fertilized, they just took care of themselves they lived for a very long, long time.

So I put in some gardens, little gardens just to decorate the place that weren’t for pick your own. And people started asking me about the gardens, and they wanted us to landscape places at their gardens just like those gardens and they also wanted us to sell them wildflower plants. And we received so much interest in the wildflowers, the landscaping the plants, that eventually we succomed to the  customers, and began to seriously study wildflowers and indeed became wildflower landscapers and started a native landscape nursery  and destination point that was in existence for over 25 years!

And so I really learned a lot about wildflowers over the years, I learned how to grow native plants from seed, how to landscape with wildflowers either using only wildflowers or to incorporate flowers into an existent non-native garden. And also how to truly grow a wildflower meadow, the way most of us think the way wildflower meadows should be grown isn’t really the case, and it’s not a hard thing to do, but it is different then what you think it might be and then we also developed Eco-Lawn which is a low maintenance turf grass that really is such a great answer to drought problems and high maintenance expensive. There’s been a busy time, never a dull moment.

Well how do you grow a wildflower meadow? I guess you don’t just broadcast the seeds on to a pile of dirt?

There are a lot of people who ask: Can you just throw the seeds anywhere? Can I throw them on my lawn? Can I just throw them on my garden? If I throw them out into a ditch will they grow? Well, most of the time the answer is no, and there’s a few key reasons for that.

First  of all, when most of us North Americans encounter seeds being sold, there in a big bag of seeds, with pretty pictures on it, or a can of seeds, or a pack of seeds and they’re usually not true North American wildflowers, most of the time they’re some random blend of European wildflowers, or not even wildflowers but plants from somewhere else that don’t tend to do well in here in the hot, very difficult conditions that we have through much of North America. If you and I happened to live in England where it rained a lot and they had this lovely perfect soil, and it’s much warmer then most parts of North America, then maybe so but here, we need to use the plants that have grown here successfully for many many thousands of years. And those are the North American Wildflowers that I specialize in.

We have so many extraordinary wildflowers and native grasses that work beautifully here. No matter what conditions you have in your garden there’s a wildflower that will thrive for you. Whether you have compacted clay, or you have beach sand, or gravel, or everything in between, whether your in the sun or the shade there are wildflowers that will work for you.

You were saying early there are some cool tihigns on the Wildflower Farm Website and one of my favorites is the seed selector tool. You key in the conditions you’ve got, you can even put in what state or province your in, or what color flowers you want, what type of everything that you want or that exists at your place and Boom! You’ve got a list of native grasses and that will thrive in exactly your conditions! It’s very, very doable. These are all flowers and grasses that tend to live a long time and are tough customers and are very beautiful as well and just happen to make amazing cut flowers too!

There’s a water savings calculator, which is on the Eco-Lawn pages, you just key in the size of your lawn, the amount of water, the number of times a week that you water.. And you can get a super quick calculation of how much money you will save by having an Eco-Lawn instead of a traditional shallow-rooted, very thirsty sod lawn.

Eco-Lawn is a blend of 7 different fine fescue grasses. These are grasses that are the same kind of grasses that you find throughout much of North America when you go into the woods, and you see these beautiful rich green clumps of grass growing in the shade. We took 7 different kinds of these fine fescue grasses and created a blend that grows believe it or not in full sun, part shade, deep shade and even under pine trees. Eco-Lawn has really deep roots that go down 9 inches in clay soil and 12-14 inches in a sandy, sandy soil and it has very fine blades and it’s wonderful to walk on barefoot. And because it has these deep roots, and fine blades, it’s need for water or nutrients is minimal, because it knows how to source them, itself. So that means you don’t automatically have to fertilize this lawn, there are occasional circustances where a top dressing of compost is a nice idea but in general this is a super low maintenance lawn that doesn’t need very much from you.

SacramentoEcoLawn

Also if you go to our website with the Eco-Lawn in it you can also see that you can grow an Eco-Lawn longer, you can leave it, because the blades are super fine, they actually fall over under their own weight, so an uncut Eco-Lawn only gets about 3½ -4”