There are ways to making the wildflower meadow seem more intensely flowerful than you even thought possible. To create a bit of a trompe l’oeil on the landscape, I like to reserve the edge conditions of a wild meadow for a rich and playful, intentional planting of plugs. Plugs are small plants, grown for transplanting into the wild meadow (or sometimes into pots for resale). With landscape plugs I can be intentional about some of the plantings, rather than leaving it up to the random order of nature. Here I used lots of red beebalm and yarrows in the foreground for a more brilliant effect. In other times of year there will be large swaths of Agastache, Lupine, or Asters in this space. Since these very plants are part of the mix, you can see them repeated as you look outwards into the larger meadow, but the intensity fades as you leave your eye’s range of focus. The intent here is to make it seem as if the meadow is like an endless garden. You can see the truth from this angle (see below). The young meadow in the background has beebalm, echinacea, and other perennial forbs in progress, but this is its second year of growth, and these plants haven’t matured enough to even flower.

The angle shifts and you can see where you have been tricked into thinking it was an endless meadow.

Want a crisp transition, consider using a simple fence to break up the wild from the cultivated.