Garden Wildflower Meadow
My Front Lawn
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My front lawn in March 2006. Late autumn mowing left it looking like any other lawn throughout the winter and early spring. |
I have had an interest in developing
wildflower meadows from garden lawns since reading Chris Baines’ inspirational
‘How To Make a Wildlife Garden’ in the 1980s. I wanted to be able to look out
over my own grassland full of cowslips in the spring and other spring flowers
with swaying flowers, flitting butterflies and buzzing bees over the summer. My
joy in gardening is seeing the wildlife that comes to visit and in some small
way redressing the terrible loss of wildlife habitat in the UK. This is an
account of how I went about creating a species-rich meadow from my front garden
lawn.
My front lawn is about
9x9metres and has two 10metre tall birch trees on its northern margin. The
estate was built in 1985 on farmland. The soil is neutral and loam-like, a
relict of deposition from ice sheets during the last period of glaciation.
Thankfully the previous owners do not appear to have been avid lawn
enthusiasts. The lawn had been cut regularly but no great effort had been made
to remove wildflowers living in the close-cropped grass.
When searching for
information on how to create a wildflower meadow, most advice states that it is
best to dig out the existing turf and topsoil before sowing a mix of meadow
seeds onto the nutrient poor sub-soil. This may seem strange, as most gardeners
would expect healthy plants to need a rich supply of nutrients. However this is
not the case with wildflower meadows. The lower the level of nutrients the
larger the range of species. The some of the most diverse and colourful plant
communities in the world grow on the poorest soils. Grasslands on limestone and
on sand dunes have incredible species richness. Adding fertilizer easily
destroys such communities allowing relatively few tall-growing species to
dominate and over-shade the rest. Soils in most lawns have nutrient levels too
high to support many wildflowers.
Having said this, digging
out one’s lawn is a rather drastic measure, which I was reluctant to try. I was
interested to see how well it would work to put one’s own lawn under a strict
meadow management regime aimed at removal of each year’s plant production. By
harvesting plant material year on year, the level of nutrients in the soil
should drop. I hoped to speed up the process of increasing wild flowers by
introducing desired species into the sward from plants established in pots. I
believed that after 3 or 4 years of management and introductions, my garden
lawn could become an excellent flower-rich meadow.
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Some of the most diverse and colourful plant communities in the world develop on poor soils even bare sand!
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Cowslips in spring
are a joy to the eye. I introduced over 50 to my meadow in 2005 and almost
all flowered in 2006. This photo is from Kenfig NNR |
