Wildflower Meadow’s Simulation And Creation Based On The Investigations Of Typical Meadows Near Beijing

Wildflower meadow is a form of landscape similar to natural meadow, created by seedling mixed herbaceous flowers’seeds. It has ornamental merits such as long flowering period, rich colors and also with strong self-sustaining and updating capability, its ecological benefits is high. In recent years, relevant scholars made a lot of discussion about its concepts, development history, landscape dominance, but few scholars studied its creation based on Plant Coenology.According to community construction mechanism based on plant traits, this paper is finished by investigating appearance and vertical structure of 4 typical meadows near Beijing. I analysed the meadows’vertical structure, species composition and their traits, seasonal character and their changes, and based on these analysis results, a "Box" model was created to statically simulate the natural meadows’vertical section and thus to instruct wildflower meadows’creation from selecting species and matching their proportion; also I investigated a number of artificial wildflower meadows in parks in North China and analysed and evaluated some selected communities’landscape by using Analytical Hierarchy Process method, to explore their guiding significance to the future wildflower meadow’s creation; based on the "Box" model, some wildflowers and commercial flowers that accord with the traits requirements were seeded separately to get knowledge of their filed emergence percentage, growth habit and ornamental character. Those species that performed well were chosen to create wildflower meadow according to "Box" model, thus to explore whether wildflower meadow instructed by "Box" meadow has superiority in ornamental and ecological features comparing to existing commercial meadows and also to discover what can still be optimized.Main conclusions are as follows:1. Natural meadow community’s structure:According to plant height, meadow community can be divided into three sub-layers, in which species and individual (tuft) numbers, important value, Shannon-Wiener diversity index, Pielou eveness index and Gleason richness index of the second sub-layer are the biggest, and those of the first sub-layer are the smallest.2. By analyzing the traits of plants in different sub-layers such as stem type, leaf area, leaf number, leaf shape, inclination angle, and crown (tuft) diameter, the appearance of natural meadow can be revealed:Stem type of the species in the first sub-layer is erect with no or less branch, that of species in the second sub-layer is mainly cespitose, and that of species in the third sub-layer is mainly stoloniferous or rosette. Leaf of species in three sub-layers is mainly microphyll type. In the first sub-layer, leaf number of species mainly is the range of 3-10, with both cauline leaf and basal leaf, shape of cauline leaf is mainly ovate and lanceolate, and mainly oblique leaf type. In the second sub-layer, leaf number of species is mainly over 11, leaf shape is linear, lanceolate, ovate and broadly ovate, and mainly oblique type. In the third sub-layer, leaf number of species is mainly the range of 3-10, leaf shape is broadly ovate, ovate, lanceolate and linear, and mainly are flat leaf type. At the same grade of important value, crown (tuft) diameter of species in the second sub-layer is the highest, and that in the first sub-layer is the lowest.3. Based on the structure and appearance of natural meadow, "Box"model of vertical section of northern meadow community is constructed. Rectangle "Box" with the larger ratio of length to width is used for simulating plants in the first sub-layer, square "Box" and rectangle "Box" with ratio of length to width smaller than that of the first sub-layer are used for simulating the second sub-layer, rectangle "Box" with the smallest ratio of length to width is used for simulating the third sub-layer, hereby, according to this model, suitable configuration of artificial wildflower combination community is 20% of high species,50% of middle height species, and 30% of short species. Besides, wildflower species and commercial species suitable for wildflower meadow’s configuration were recommended.4. Existing domestic artificial meadows are with characters as follows:colorful, strong, presenting a vigorous landscape. But compared with natural meadow and excellent foreign design cases, their disadvantages are also obvious, such as the spices, used are often with high frequency, and thus made the landscapes are too similar and without distinguishing characters, especially the species of Composite which with definite superiority, would lead to cutthroat competition and community degradation; Besides, there is usually no structure in artificial community and each species are always with similar flowering period, thus the landscape always has no outstanding view and background view and has no layering. Such problems should be avoided in the future designing.5. Wildflower meadow based on "Box" model has relatively clear structure as preconceived, especially the Third sub-layer played the background role well. Thus it is meaningful to be optimized and generalized.