Meadows!

Andrea andrea • July 12, 2025

As summer unfolds, we find ourselves savoring the simple, joyful moments that our gardens bring. This season beautifully highlights our ongoing commitment to supporting urban wildlife habitats.


It’s such a joy to watch butterflies dance through the flowers, birds flit among the branches, and bees busily explore each blossom. Creating gardens that nurture life is one of the most rewarding parts of being a gardener.


The Beauty and Benefits of Meadows


One of the best ways to invite butterflies, and other pollinators, into your garden is by planting a meadow. Not only are meadows breathtakingly beautiful, but they also provide a vital habitat for a wide variety of wildlife.


A meadow’s open structure—filled with a mix of grasses, annuals, and perennials—creates a welcoming space for butterflies to find food and shelter. From marshy wetlands and mountain slopes to deserts and beyond, meadows are a part of natural landscapes all over the world. Perhaps that’s why we feel so connected to them. Lawns and open parks echo this connection, offering a familiar sense of peace and wellness that meadows inspire.



Whether nestled in a wild landscape or blooming in a city garden, meadows offer butterflies both food and shelter. The greater the diversity of flowers, especially those with long and overlapping bloom times, the more butterfly species your garden will attract and support.

STOP USING WEED CLOTH!


Before we do any planting in our gardens at Mariposa, the Install Team prepares the soil for success. There is a curious practice out there that we often encounter when we are beginning to prepare the soil for planting in a new garden. Weed cloth is regularly added to gardens with the misconception that it will reduce weed pressure. This false notion is promoted by the garden industry to sell a product that will alleviate one of the dreaded garden tasks—weeding. The short term downside of weed cloth is that it will only discourage weeds temporarily. If the garden is neglected, weeds will still persist. Over time, a garden that was prepared with weed cloth will get weeds, and the roots of those weeds will grow into the plastic “cloth” mesh, making them impossible to remove.

Creating Butterfly Meadows at Mariposa


When we design and build meadows at Mariposa, we focus first and foremost on attracting butterflies. These graceful pollinators are a clear and visible sign of a thriving, balanced garden ecosystem. Building meadows for butterflies will attract a wide range of pollinators and beneficial insects. Simple to build and endlessly rewarding, butterfly meadows offer natural pest control, better pollination, and a burst of biodiversity—all from planting a thoughtful mix of grasses and flowers.


With every meadow we create, we help support butterflies and work to offset their losses in the wild by increasing their populations in the city.

What Makes a Butterfly Meadow?

A butterfly meadow is essentially a combination of nectar-rich flowers and sheltering grasses. In urban gardens, these meadows often attract Monarchs, Swallowtails, and Skippers—important indicator species that will tell you that your meadow is healthy.


If there are specific butterflies you’d love to see in your garden, it’s helpful to know what plants they’re drawn to. The Xerces Society is a fantastic resource with detailed information on butterfly species and the native flowers and grasses they rely on.


How to Create a Butterfly Meadow


Whether you’re starting small or transforming your entire lawn, here’s how we recommend building a butterfly meadow from scratch:



  1. Start with the soil. Remove any existing lawn or plants. Even a 5’x5’ area is a great place to begin!
  2. Layer cardboard. Lay down 2–3 layers of cardboard, overlapping the edges to block out weeds.
  3. Install irrigation. If you're using a drip system, lay the lines right over the cardboard.
  4. Add compost. Spread about 3 inches of compost over the cardboard.


  5. Fertilize. Lightly sprinkle with organic fertilizer. We suggest Down to Earth, E. B. Stone, and Fox Farm.

  6. Plant live plants. Cut an “X” in the cardboard where you want to plant. Dig your hole, then try to tuck the cardboard back around            the plant to suppress weeds.

  7. Mulch. Add about 1 inch of ¼” fir mulch around the plants.

  8. Planting seeds? You can sow them directly over the clean, ¼” mulch layer—it works beautifully!

  9. Water well. Keep your new meadow hydrated, especially in the first few weeks.

  10. Enjoy the show. Watch your meadow grow—and delight in the butterflies, bees, and other visitors it welcomes.

By Andrea andrea June 9, 2025
CHECK YOUR SOIL! Isn’t it great to feel the longer and warmer days of late Spring? I love the feeling of going outside and seeing the sun, shining brightly on all of the green leaves and beautiful flowers. It is so wonderful to feel the glow of summer approaching. What a joy to get caught up in that glow, while we watch the gardens grow gorgeously. However, that joy makes it easy to forget that here in the Bay Area, we are entering the months long dry season. Our Mediterranean climate shifts this time of year, which can transform gardens from showing lots of flowering and new green growth, to gardens where soils and plants become dry and damaged. This transition can lead to health issues in the garden over the coming weeks and months. While plants are still thriving from the lovely winter rains, the soils are now drying out. We often don’t realize that the soils are becoming too dry because at this time of year, it takes plants longer to show signs of stress. However, if we know what is about to come, we can stay ahead of the dry season and the damage that hydrophobic soils can do to our garden.
By Andrea andrea May 3, 2025
With the warmer temperatures and longer days, gardens are literally bursting with hope. New leaves unfurl and early blooms emerge under the lengthening days and warming temperatures. April never fails to inspire me with its magical expression in the natural world. Each year, as this phenomenon occurs, I am delighted by the immense force that nature has to replenish and re-emerge anew. Being able to count on the small miracles of leafing out and blooming helps to give stability in an unstable world. Tending a garden is not only therapeutic for our soul, but also will help heal your local environment.
By Andrea andrea April 28, 2025
Spring is an amazing time of year to witness rebirth and transformation in the garden. Buds are swelling, flowers are beginning to bloom and butterflies are starting the procession of early, mid and late seasonal emergence into the garden! All of the subtle and beautiful change that happens day to day draws us gardeners out into the garden to witness the fullness of spring. During March, we see a chorus of changes in the garden, each element playing in harmony. Paying close attention to how your garden is changing and developing during this season can help you to become a better guardian for habitat protection. In Mariposa’s newsletters and articles , we discuss that in order to protect habitat in the winter garden, one must be very careful. Many grown pollinators and butterflies, as well as their dormant eggs gather protection under the leaves and in the dried stems of flowering perennials such as Echinacea (purple coneflower) and Rudbeckia (black eyed Susan).
By Andrea andrea January 11, 2025
How to cultivate life in your garden and provide more habitat for pollinators!
A bunch of orange flowers are growing in a field.
By Andrea Hurd September 18, 2024
As the reality of climate change looms larger, the need for individual action becomes imperative. Our weather is growing hotter, rain patterns are erratic, and fires across the Western US are increasingly more destructive.
A bunch of pink flowers are growing in the grass.
By Andrea Hurd September 12, 2024
Gardening connects us to nature. It also invites us to think like scientists. The garden is our laboratory where experimentation, observation, and evaluation are a part of the process. ​
Two women are standing next to each other holding a certificate.
By Janet Richardson June 21, 2024
We're so excited to announce that we won the California Landscape Contractors Association 2023 Beautification Award for Small Design/Build Installation!
A person is walking along a path next to a lake surrounded by trees.
By Andrea Hurd June 30, 2023
Is the drought over? Do we still need to conserve water in our homes? Can we go back to watering our gardens? Folks who live in Northern California, where we have been experiencing extreme drought conditions for the past several years, want to know.
A patio with chairs and a fire pit in the backyard of a house.
By Andrea Hurd May 17, 2023
LITHOHYDROLOGY Harvesting water through the use of dry laid stone work​ 
By Andrea Hurd January 10, 2023
How we prep for planted areas at Mariposa
More Posts