Turn Your Garden into a Monet‑Inspired Meadowscape (Part I)
Get Inspired Week 118
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. — Claude Monet
With the rising popularity of more naturalized landscaping, homeowners are falling in love with meadowscapes more than ever. Those dreamy, billowing mounds of flowers feel like you just stepped into a glorious Midwestern prairie right outside your own door. Below is The Inspired Garden’s take on our Monet-inspired meadowscape effortless look.
And even though this style was originally meant for vast, open spaces, most homeowners don’t have that much room (or even want that much to maintain). Even if you don’t have a large space, you can still capture that same organic vibe in smaller areas.
Check out other garden trends in 2026 in 9 Garden Trends That Will Feed Your Soul in 2026.
Choosing the Right Canvas
Prairies are wide, open fields of flowers and grasses, so this style really shines in larger areas. Many of the typical plants used in meadowscapes prefer full sun and drier conditions (just like plants common in the Midwest), so try to find a spot with at least 6–8 hours of light and well‑draining soil. You can absolutely get this look in part shade or with plants that need more water, but you’ll be designing with a slightly different plant list.
Because this is often a bigger planting bed, make sure you have a realistic plan for watering, whether that’s manual watering or an irrigation system. Even though many of these plants tolerate drought beautifully, they still need consistent watering to get established.
Are you enjoying the spontaneity of this garden? Check out our Substack Making a Statement: Inside the Showstopping Garden.
Drifts of Blooms, Like a Monet Painting
Plant selection for this type of garden is all about texture and movement that lend a sense of serenity. Since The Inspired Garden is all about the flowers, most of the garden is filled with flowering perennials, then layered with grasses and small shrubs for structure.
A few guidelines for designing your Monet-inspired meadowscape:
Go for a variety of heights and bloom times so you have interest in every season.
Limit the total number of varieties so it feels natural and cohesive rather than chaotic.
Keep the overall color palette focused on just a few main hues so it feels calm and cohesive, then weave in the occasional pop of brighter or deeper color as an accent to add dimension and play against the greens, tans, and golds of the grasses, echoing the meadows you see in the countryside.
To get those soft mounds of color that feel like a painting, plant in drifts. A drift is an elongated grouping of the same plant clustered together, moving across the landscape like a Monet portrait. If you’re limited on space, use single, large, wide perennials instead of many small plants to get that same effect.
Another way to get this look on a smaller scale is to tuck plants from our meadowscape list into your existing beds, weaving in airy perennials and grasses among your landscaping
While meadow gardens are traditionally perennial‑focused, we like to mix in annuals to ensure continuous color all season long. Consider flowers that echo the dreamy airy vibe you are creating.
Encourage wildlife by choosing plants known to be excellent pollinators and by leaving seed pods up during winter so birds can snack on them
Dive into the differences of Perennials vs Annuals and how to get more continuous color in your garden in our Substack: Revisiting Annuals Vs. Perennials.
Interested in designing more natural landscapes? Check out our The Inspired Gardens Only Course to learn how to get that dreamy effortless style.
As you start imagining your garden through this softer, Monet-inspired vision, think about places where you can trade straight lines for sweeping curves, and gentle movement. In Part 2, I will share our favorite plants to help bring your meadowscape to life.
Keep on dreaming,
Laura
Looking for more garden design inspiration? Check out our all-online, go-at-your-own-pace course: Designing Luxurious Gardens and Containers: The Inspired Garden Masterclass. With new garden and container designs dropping each season, we can help you achieve the garden of your dreams in 2025 and beyond. Join us today and learn how to design like the pros!