Ah, a meadow. Even just the sound of the word is pretty. When I was a kid, a meadow was not a thing I ever encountered in my daily life in 1970s suburbia. No, it was something that I came across only in storybooks and daydreams. If my sister Kris and I ever found a little patch of clovers in our Tallahassee lawn, we’d call it a meadow; we’d pretend it was a meadow. We’d make clover-flower crowns and try to frolic in our little two-foot-wide patch of weeds, but even though it was fun, we were never quite satisfied. We still longed to see a real meadow.

It turned out I’d have to wait until I was 30. That year, my husband, Rob, and I went to Colorado on vacation and we spent a summer afternoon in a meadow near the little mountain town of Silverton. It was an amazing alpine meadow with a ghost town in the middle of it. The buildings were silvery skeletons inhabited by chipmunks and birds. Blue larkspur grew up through the floorboards of the old houses, and larkspur, bluebells, showy daisies, Indian paintbrush, and soft grasses filled the places that had long ago been streets. As we watched the sun set from a half-rotten porch and ate a not-very-tasty picnic of stale English muffins, the chipmunks kept trying to steal our crumbs.

About a year later, we bought our first house, in Atlanta, and we decided to plant our own meadow on our narrow city lot. Unfortunately, the yard was very shady and there was only a tiny corner, maybe 6 feet long and 3 feet wide, that received any sun at all. Well, we crammed that little spot with purple coneflowers, prairie coneflowers, mountainmint, ageratum, cup-plant, joe-pye weed, milkweed, and more—and pretty soon, despite its small size, our miniature meadow was humming with pollinators. Rob, particularly, fell in love with that little meadow garden. He was always poking around out there with a hand lens. I remember there was a green lynx spider that lived on the cup-plant, and he would watch the spider so carefully that he came to know all her daily habits and to regard her, it seemed, as a dear friend.

As soon as we moved to Quincy, I set about creating another, larger wildflower meadow in a barren spot between the driveway and the old detached kitchen behind the house. At first I planted all kinds of plants that didn’t work, but now, 14 years later, our meadow is full of plants that do work: bluestar, Indian pinks, Atamasco lily, white wild indigo, purple coneflower, prairie coneflower, swamp tickseed, oxeye sunflower, bellflower, beardtongue, ageratom, and mountainmint, to name just a few.

I love my Quincy meadow because it brings a bit of wildness into my yard. It’s interesting rather than tidy—bursting with color, buzzing with bees, and fluttering with butterflies. It’s so wonderfully alive that it makes the rest of my yard seem a little boring.

One of the big reasons I planted my meadow in Quincy was for my niece, Sophie, to help fill her childhood with flowers, with beauty. In the early days, as I was digging and watering and weeding and seeding, I’d often imagine her skipping down the path through my future meadow, or I’d picture her picking lavish bouquets or making flower hats for her dolls—and those dreams drove me forward, kept me going. I wanted to give Sophie a lovely place to play and learn about nature, and I wanted to fire her imagination, give her fuel for her own meadow dreams.