Make A Garden Meadow

Our green-fingered expert shows how to plant and curate a piece of meadow heaven

- SUSIE WHITE

A favourite area of my garden is my mini meadow. I love the moon daisies flowering on tall stalks like a child's drawing of a flower. Then there are the vivid pink flowers of red campion and ragged robin mixed with purple self-heal, red clover and the soft pink of lady's smock. Most exciting of all, my common spotted orchids, pale purple with spots on their petals, have seeded themselves and I now have many times the amount that I started with.

Orchid seed is incredibly fine and blows like dust in the wind. So I was delighted, but perhaps not surprised, when I found some had germinated on the far side of the garden in a patch of lawn chamomile! Orchid seed can survive for five years in the soil but on germination, it needs help from a special fungus to get started.

Leave your lawn to grow in No-mow May and you might be surprised by what wildflowers have been suppressed by the mowing. And if you want to dedicate an area to meadow it's not difficult, but you need to have a clear idea of which sort you want to establish.

Poor Soil, Rich Rewards

There are two types of meadow - annual and perennial - and it's important to know which kind you are aiming for. Annual meadows are bright with scarlet poppies, blue cornflowers and yellow com marigolds. They need sowing every spring into prepared bare ground that is free of weeds, lumps of soil and stones. They are a dream when in full flower but there is nothing to see for a large part of the year. You also have the annual cost, and work, of sowing the seed.

A perennial meadow is more subtle, a mixture of wildflowers and grasses. It needs ground that is not too fertile, or the stronger growing grasses will overwhelm the flowers, and higher nitrogen encourages plants such as dock, nettle or hogweed to thrive.