What is the best way of engaging in gardening one-upmanship nowadays? With a
spanking new, shiny ride-on mower? A Japanese-style tea garden? A collection
of rare tropical orchids in their own dedicated glasshouse? No: with a
wildflower meadow, holding at least 80 varieties of native flowers and
grasses. Topped by a shimmering cloud of butterflies, a meadow, with a path
casually mown through it, has replaced the emerald-green rolled and
pinstriped sward as the mark of a smart garden – plus, it scores eco-points
by providing a low-impact home to local flora and fauna.
Prince Charles has one at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire home – and who could
be smarter than that? So do Lady Bamford (whose Daylesford garden at Chelsea
this year included a mini meadow), Sting and all the Royal Horticultural
Society’s gardens, the best being at Hyde Hall in Essex. A wildflower meadow
is one of the most famous features in the late Christopher Lloyd’s garden at
Great Dixter, in East Sussex, which has just won a Heritage Lottery grant of
£4m to preserve it for the nation.
Cut for hay in July, traditional meadows are usually grazed by animals until
the autumn. However, according to The Wildlife Trusts, 95% of these fields
have been lost in this country since the second world war due to changes in
farming practice and the widespread use of fertilisers and herbicides.
Polly Devlin and her husband, Andy Garnett, are so devoted to one of the
fields on their land near Bruton in Somerset that they wrote A Year in the
Life of an English Meadow, which was published last year. They bought the
field after persuading the local farmer not to cover it with slurry – this
would have fertilised the grass and the plant diversity would have been lost
for ever – and have nurtured it over the past 25 years. It is now a Site of
Special Scientific Interest and home to 136 varieties of wildflowers and
grasses.
“Most farmers have only seven kinds of grass, to feed their cattle and make
silage,” says Devlin. She points disdainfully to a nearby field she doesn’t
own, the shorn grass lush and green, cut in June for silage, which means any
flowers do not have time to set seed: “An iridescent desert,” she says. “It
doesn’t sustain any wildlife.” The farmer, of course, might argue that it
provides fodder for his cattle. Devlin leaves her own field uncut until
about now, then sends in sheep for six weeks to graze it “like a fine tooth
comb”, which keeps the grasses in check.
There’s the rub – not everyone has a flock of sheep to hand. You might think
that creating a wildflower meadow is just a case of neglecting a patch of
your garden and, hey presto, it will be filled with beautiful native flowers
and humming with wildlife. In fact, it can take considerable time and effort
to get the conditions right. Docks, thistles, nettles, brambles and even
grasses are also all wildflowers – they just aren’t ones most people would
welcome, on account of their thuggish habits. And it it these that are
likely to colonise a fallow area if the soil is rich.
Jinny Blom, who has created meadows for Lisbet Rausing in the Highlands and
Lady Getty in the Chilterns, among others, says achieving the right balance
of plants is more difficult than it might appear. “It’s not just a case of
letting nature take its way,” says the designer, well known for her
naturalistic style. “Many people think that meadows are a cheap way of
getting a garden, but if you want annuals, you often have to seed them –
they can be very expensive.” Cornflowers and poppies, for example, are in
fact annual weeds that would appear in cornfields, where, unlike in meadows,
the soil would be disturbed by regular cultivation.
Another mistake people make is to expect that their patch will go on flowering
in perfect harmony from spring to autumn. “Lots of people want bulbs [such
as bluebells and fritillaries, which flower in spring] in their wild
meadows, but that is a tale of woe as the bulbs and wildflowers do not come
out at the same time and the mowing regime goes to pieces,” says Blom.
September is a good time to seed a meadow (or you can wait until next March
and April if your soil is damp, so the seeds don’t rot over winter). So, how
do you achieve your own patch of para-dise? Here are some guidelines.
It’s all in the soil
If you want to have an area that will need little maintenance, you need to
make sure it is low in fertility. Happily, conditions that would be adverse
for many plants are perfect for wildflowers: crushed concrete, sand, rubble
and gravel, for instance, are ideal. One man’s waste is another’s wildflower
haven.
If your soil is rich and fertile, the grasses will thrive at the expense of
other species. To avoid this, you need either to remove the topsoil (someone
else will be grateful for it), leaving poor subsoil, or choose plants that
thrive in such conditions – taller species such as meadowsweet, black
knapweed and tufted vetch. It will also need more maintenance, as you will
have to cut the area about four times a year, in order not to let the thugs
take over.
“The effort should be at the beginning, and the starting point is critical,”
says Richard Scott, senior project manager at Landlife, a conservation
charity that has transformed large areas around Liverpool housing estates
into fields of rippling flowers and grasses worthy of a Flake advertisement.
Right plant, right place
There is no point in sowing a damp fertile area with plants that you normally
find on chalky downland, as they will not survive in the battle against the
grasses. As with any garden, when planting, you should take into
consideration whether a site is sunny or shady, damp or dry, sloping or
flat, and its soil acid, neutral or alkaline. Look around you and see what
survives in the wild: creeping buttercups, cow parsley and thistles would
suggest rich conditions; wild carrot, greater knapweed and harebells a
low-fertility chalkland.
Yellow rattle, a parasite that feeds on the roots of grasses, is often cited
as a panacea for keeping them at bay, but Scott is sceptical. “It is quite
difficult to establish,” he says. “It is a bit like poppies in that it is
not reliable.” However, he concedes that, once you do get it going, it works
well.
The wildflower seed suppliers are experts on what survives in what conditions,
as well as at what density to sow, so take their advice. As well as seed
mix-es, you can also buy young plants. It is a more expensive option (at
about 20p a plant, which can add up over a large area), but will give those
that are slow to establish, such as harebells and meadow cranesbill, a head
start.
Further reading A Year in the Life of an English Meadow by Andy Garnett
and Polly Devlin (Frances Lincoln £20), Making a Wildflower Meadow by Pam
Lewis (Frances Lincoln £16.99), Pocket Nature: Wildflowers (Dorling
Kindersley £9.99).
Suppliers Landlife Wildflowers (0151 737 1819, www.wildflower.org.uk),
Really Wild Flowers (01747 811778, www.reallywildflowers.co.uk
), Emorsgate Seeds (01553 829028, www.wildseeds.co.uk).
Further information www.rhs.org.
uk/advice/profiles0600/wildflower.asp .
What to grow in your field of dreams
The harebell Campanula rotundifoliaproduces pretty blue-violet flowers
from July to October and is usually found on dry grass- and heathland
The yellow-flowered bird’s foot trefoil, Lotus corniculatus,
takes its name from the shape of the pods that appear on its stalks. It
appears in grasslands
Oxeye daisies, Leucanthemum vulgare, prefer heavy soils but survive in
most conditions: clumps of their 2ft 6in flowers are a common sight on
motorway verges in summer
The bright red annual field or corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas, has become
better known as the Flanders poppy after it appeared across the churned-up
battlefields of the first world war
