The glorious clouds of cow parsley along the roadside verges this month have got me thinking about wildflowers. They can be fleeting, but en masse they are certainly beautiful. If you’d like to recreate this wild look in your garden, a wildflower meadow area could be the way to go.
Lest you think I have delusions of grandeur, this is something that can be scaled down to the tiniest of mini-meadows in a small garden – the secret to getting it right is in where you put it. Larger gardens will have room for a bigger wildflower area, maybe with apple trees and a hedge of native plants too. You can have a path of shorter grass mown through your ‘meadow’ if you have the space.
Wildflowers provide much needed food for bees, butterflies and other beneficial insects, all the more important as intensive farming and building destroys the natural habitat of these creatures. Neatness, often so prized in our gardens, is really the enemy of biodiversity, and allowing or encouraging plants to grow wild is one of the best things you can do to promote it.
Keeping your wild area near the boundaries or close to a hedge makes sense, as you can plant ‘neater’ things or evergreens for year- round interest in front of it, closer to your seating areas or house. It can be a good idea to remove most of your topsoil too, and use this elsewhere in the garden – rich soil is great for grass, but grass will compete with your wildflowers (and win ), so in general the poorer and better drained the soil is, the more your wildflowers will thrive.
Anne’s Tip of the Week:
If you’re planning to sow wildflower seeds in your garden, make sure you source them from a reputable (ideally Irish ) supplier, to make sure the seed mix doesn’t contain potentially invasive weeds such as blackgrass, which can play havoc with our native countryside, not to mention crops.
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