I DON’T see the point of wildflower meadows. I know they’re fashionable and lots of our friends have made them, but I have never seen a really convincing one. Why not? Well, for starters, there’s something ridiculously artificial about cultivating wild flowers.
It’s an oxymoron. And the great enemy of meadow success in our benign climate is grass (the principal element in any true meadow), because it competes with the flowering plants and usually squeezes them out. So you have to scrape away all the nitrogen-rich topsoil that grasses love, before sowing your mix of wild-flower seed on infertile subsoil. Then the war on grass continues, which means that you need to include yellow rattle in your mix, because it lives as a parasite on grasses and weakens them so that they don’t compete so vigorously with your flowers. You can’t gainsay the theory, but, in practice, the wildflowers don’t perform properly either. They like a good feed just as much as we all do.
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