What Britain's top garden designers are planting now to create dazzling spring meadows around their homes

The late Christopher Lloyd clearly felt he had to make a case for the particular kind of meadow that greets you as you arrive at Great Dixter in East Sussex. ‘Your first sight, on entering the front gate, is of two areas of rough grass, on either side of the path to the house… They are not just plots of grass that we gave up mowing for lack of labour, but were intended from the first.’ Every spring for more than 100 years, the turf here has transformed into a glorious, dancing tapestry of delicate flowering bulbs in long grass: pale silvery Crocus tommasinianus, the wild daffodil Narcissus pseudonarcissus and the chequered snake’s-head fritillary.

These two uplifting strips of jewelled meadow light up with different bulbs in succession until the spikes of starry blue Camassia quamash are accompanied by four kinds of native orchid that simply arrived by themselves. Apart from cutting the grass when everything has set seed — and being sure to take the cut material away — the only other requirement is to ‘keep experimenting with other ingredients, looking for those that will take care of themselves, once given a start’.

William Robinson was advocating a similar low-maintenance way to ‘really enjoy’ the beauty of spring flowering bulbs even earlier. His revolutionary 1870 book The Wild Garden proposed planting bulbs ‘in natural groups or prettily fringed colonies’ in areas of long grass so that ‘everything should be varied, indefinite and changeful’. He established the extraordinary six-acre Great Meadow, the first of its kind, in front of his West Sussex house, Gravetye Manor. Today, under head gardener Tom Coward, the meadow continues to shimmer and dazzle from early spring until midsummer with thousands of bulbs planted by Robinson and thousands more added in the past 15 years by Mr Coward.

As we reconsider our treatment of bulbs as a disposable spectacle, a tangible appetite is emerging for reimagining the traditional, long-lasting jewelled meadow. Angel Collins designs classically beautiful country gardens and understands the need to be practical, too. She has seen her concept of the parterre meadow take off in the past 10 years. ‘I nearly always do them for clients. There is usually an area that needs to be low maintenance and this really is.’

In her own garden, she took a three-quarter acre of former pony paddock and marked out 22 rectangles — four main ones and 18 smaller ones — mowing paths in between. She added cubes of yew for structure and a scattering of flowering shrubs and small trees for height and colour throughout the season. There are multi-stem Amelanchier lamarckii for spring blossom and autumn colour, roses ‘Scharlachglut’ (for scarlet flowers and shiny autumn hips) and ‘Cerise Bouquet’ (with its gracefully arching habit and cherry-crimson flowers) and also Calycanthus ‘Aphrodite’, which produces burgundy, magnolia-like flowers from July to August.

Then come the bulbs. Her year begins with Narcissus ‘Thalia’ and ‘Avalanche’ — ‘the lovely neat white ones’ and continues with tulips in rich velvety colours, such as ‘Queen of Night’, ‘Apricot Foxx’, ‘Slawa’ and ‘Mariette’. Lavender-blue Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’ and the white ‘Alba’ follow with N. poeticus and alliums. ‘The soil is rich and the grass grows long, so you need tall alliums,’ notes Mrs Collins. ‘Allium cristophii simply won’t work. One of the best is A. nigrum — the robust, flat-bottomed one — it naturalises so well.’ When to cut the grass is key. ‘If you want camassias, you must wait until the beginning of July. I get someone in with a scythe mower and remove and compost the cut grass. It freshens everything up and looks wonderful.’

The writer and garden designer Mary Keen has created a jewelled meadow behind her honey-coloured house in a West Country market town. After years of working at scale around a Georgian rectory, she relished the chance to be exacting about the right bulbs to create a small, but perfectly formed embroidery of spring flowers. ‘I wanted the ghostly white Crocus tommasinianus, but suppliers are always sending something darker that doesn’t naturalise well. I had some from Sissinghurst in Kent in the end because they were digging them up.’ As well as crocus, her initial layer of bulbs included Anemone blanda (‘the blue shades’) and the tall pink Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus, ‘you need the good dark form from Great Dixter’. She was reluctant to use narcissus because their leaves are so messy after flowering, but has ‘gone over to jonquils’ and recommends Narcissus fernandesii var. cordubensis and ‘Kokopelli’, which have almost chive-like foliage and numerous tiny, scented flowers along each stem.

She tries out narcissus in pots to get to know them and plants them out, adding a few fresh bulbs to avoid the ‘bunchy’, post-container effect. Species tulips are suitably delicate. ‘I have Tulipa clusiana, T. humilis and, best of all, T. acuminata’ — which she admires for its fiery shredded petals as the grass grows longer — and later there is Camassia quamash ‘the smaller, darker wild one’, which, at only 12in, is exactly the right size. She advises taking photographs in spring so you can see what to add in autumn: ‘This year, I’m putting more jonquils near the edges.’

In the Netherlands, bulbs that naturalise well are called stinzenplanten after the old country house gardens where spectacular sheets of anemones, crocus and muscari emerge each spring, even if the original house has gone. Dutch bulb suppliers are working hard to tempt us with gorgeous and subtle new versions of these revered favourites and landscape designer, florist and ‘bulbista’ Carien van Boxtel (the expert to whom Sarah Raven turns for bulb advice) is keen to stretch the idea of a jewelled meadow into something more ‘varied indefinite and changeful’ than even Robinson could have imagined.

In 2023, she was commissioned by JUB Holland and Rijnbeek Perennials to design the first sustainable scheme for decades at the famous Keukenhof Garden near Amsterdam in the Netherlands — which otherwise relies on seven million annual tulip bulbs for its spectacular March–May displays. Instead of turf, Ms van Boxtel uses grasses, such as Melica altissima ‘Alba’, with its airy, rice-like flowers, and the light-catching Bowles’s golden grass, as well as ferns and perennials with handsome spring foliage, such as the lacy-leaved Thalictrum ‘Black Stockings’, to create a textured background for a succession of delectable bulbs.

She uses bulbs to paint with colour: crocuses range from ‘Blue Pearl’ with its shiny silver interior to rich-purple ‘Aqua’ to ‘Flower Record’, another rich mauve with prominent orange stamens. ‘After flowering, the leaves of crocus grow like crazy, which is another trick to give a planting scheme a meadowy feel.’ Conversely, she selects grape hyacinths that don’t produce too much ‘annoying’ foliage and form subtle ribbons of deep indigo (Muscari latifolium) faded wine red (M. ‘Grape Hyacinth’) and palest blue (M. armeniacum ‘Valerie Finnis’). Ms van Boxtel’s Bulb Mania plant list is intoxicating. My favourite new discovery is her way of using wonderful new varieties of fritillary: ‘They are so important to add height’. I meet the 3ft-high Fritillaria persica ‘Green Dreams’, which produces loose-hanging bells of a strange, almost dirty pale-green and brown — and I am smitten.

Garden designer Sheila Jack specialises in making contemporary gardens and has created a sophisticated ‘clean and restrained’ bulb meadow in her Wiltshire garden. She uses the bright-green perennial grass Sesleria autumnalis as a matrix into which she plants a limited succession of bulbs and perennials. First come shoals of white Narcissus ‘Thalia’, which flower at the same time as the white-flowered crab apple Malus ‘Evereste’.

These are followed by the stars of the show: magical spires of Camassia leichtlinii ‘Pink Star’. ‘They are properly gorgeous — strong stems and big flowers of the prettiest pale pink with egg-yolk stamens.’ The camassia bulbs came from specialist supplier Hare Spring Cottage Plants in Devon — you have to be quick off the mark to order even a few — and are followed by waves of Iris sibirica, then floating blue heads of Devil’s bit scabious.

Maintenance is ‘minimal compared with the time it takes to remove cut grass from wildflower meadows. I simply give the sesleria a good trim in February to stop it flopping’. The result is a simple, but entrancing meadow that links the more intensely flowery borders near the house to the landscape beyond.