The Perfect Meadow

I fell in love with meadows before they became fashionable. I grew up in the 1960s and whilst my mother did the housework I went out to play with my friends.  We rode our bikes along quiet country lanes edged with blackberry bushes and made our makeshift dens in cornfields dotted with red poppies.  We created daisy chains and waded through waste high grasses, soaking up the sun and eating homemade blackcurrant jam and Cheshire cheese sandwiches. 

Re-creating the ‘natural’ wildflower meadow is popular at the moment. The idea is that a boring patch of lawn can be simply transformed into a wildflower meadow which provides cover and food for wildlife and requires far less maintenance than a traditional lawn.  All you do is buy a few packers of wild flower seeds and broadcast them over your lawn and you will have a wonderful display of wildflowers to provide interest from early spring to the end of summer.  

Unfortunately, re-creating a natural meadow that reappears year after year is anything but simple.  For a start, there is usually too much fertility in your lawn to allow wildflowers to establish themselves.  You can try mowing, scarifying, strimming and starving the lawn to reduce the nutrients available and hope that the vigorous grasses and weeds lose their grip on the soil.  However, this is not as effective as killing off the grass completely and eradicating thugs such as dandelions, thistles, nettles, dock and couch grass.  If you don’t like chemicals then this means covering the lawn with black plastic or matting for a year or two.  Some experts recommend you then remove all the top soil before planting with a special grass and wildflower seed mix or more expensively, laying wildflower turf.

You can’t throw out your strimmer and mower either because the meadow will need cutting and the time of year you cut it, will determine the types of wild flowers that will grow. And remember too that wildflowers have their buddies and don’t take too kindly to interlopers. Moreover, whilst you may start free of thugs, they will creep back in and within a few years you will have lost all the wild flowers.  Even yellow rattle which is reputed to help keep the grasses under control, is not foolproof.

Poppies grow in cornfields because they compete equally with the corn but it is the ploughing that brings them back year after year.  Like many wild flowers, poppy seeds only germinate in ground disturbed by ploughing or animals eg sheep. So don’t forget to scarify, will you?

Managing a meadow takes time, effort and persistence and Doc and I do not have unlimited time.  There are other new things we would like to do in the garden too and since we have a garden with a view of the natural landscape and enough wild life to fill a zoo, we have decided to be realistic keep our ‘meadow’ simple. 

We have allocated a couple of small open, sunny areas in the orchard where there are already snowdrops and bluebells.  We are lucky that the grass in the orchard comprises of original meadow grasses rather than 'lawn' turf and the plan for next year is to cut the grass to within an inch of its life - after the bulbs have flowered - and kill off any thugs.  We shall experiment by adding some wildflower plugs such as cowslips and I have some red campion (which is pink!) in another part of the garden which might do well. 

Meanwhile, we are leaving these areas un-mown for the rest of the season, to see what grows and whether or not we would like a smaller or larger area.  So far it looks promising and we like the contrast between the mown grass and un-mown grass.  We shall keep an eye on it and see what happens. Already we have some poppies, daisies and some orange flowers which we have not identified yet.  It is all looking very natural, especially with the rabbit holes and dandelions.....