Member's Meadow - English Cottage Garden in CA

The home setting, viewed from the garden site, shows how the quick-blooming annuals filled in with a rainbow of color.

The Caspars created an authentic “English Cottage Garden” to enhance their English Tudor-style home. From their carefully chosen mixture of seeds, CA Poppies bloom in the lower right, Farewel-to-Spring adds lots of pink spires, & Red Poppies add their brilliant color at the top.

Farewell-to-Spring, Clarkia elegans, made lavish color for the Caspars, and why not?  This beautiful wildflower is a California native, does well almost anywhere, but in this case, the plants must have been happy to be home!

The Red Poppies also added lots of color to the garden. This closeup illustrates the diversity of this one species of wildflower. Our seed often blooms with white, pink, pure red, bi-colors, & sometimes, as seen here, fully double flowers.

The English Cottage Garden look is complete in this photo. The seeds have created a riot of color, filling in around other established plants. Here, the seedling flowers add early color while the Caspars wait for the budding rose bush at left to bloom.

Dear American Meadows:
There was an article in our local San Diego paper, The Union Tribune, that mentioned American Meadows as a source for wildflower seeds. Since we have one of the few English Tudor-style homes in the area, and have been trying to get that English Garden look for 20 years, we decided to try it with your seeds.

We ordered the California Coastal Mix along with some California Poppy and red poppy seeds. I hand broadcasted them throughout our garden just prior to the first rain of the season in December of last year. We only get an average of 10 inches of rain per year during our "rainy season", and our total for this year was around 9 inches. Fortunately the storms that we did get were spaced almost exactly a month apart.

Anyhow, I was a little concerned that I had gotten a little carried away when the ground initially looked like I had planted new grass! But after about two months we started, those little seedlings began to bloom! And it has been wonderfully exciting each day since to go out and see the new flowers. I actually made a scorecard from your website's flower species photos to be able to identify all of the players, and I think we've seen every one of the 20 varieties listed on the package.

It's a little embarrassing to admit that I called American Meadows to mention that we hadn't seen any red poppies, and your customer service department promptly sent a replacement packet without charge. About a week later some of the original plants I had been watching burst into a blaze of red. Needless to say my face was the same color.

We've loved taking and sharing photos of our wildflower garden from all angles and up very close and personal.

We’re delighted to share the photos!
Thank you, American Meadows!!

.....Bill and Lynda Caspar, San Diego