Is creating a meadow garden really worth the hassle?
They're hard work to make, challenging to get right and you might end up with thuggish weeds taking over! Nick Bailey weighs up the pros and cons of meadows
For the last twenty years we’ve seen the fashion for creating meadows explode. Once the preserve of the countryside where they are best defined as ‘pieces of grass-covered land mown for hay’, they now adorn our cities, parks, estates and private gardens. There is a sort of irony here in that as historic, wild, flora-rich meadows are in decline rurally, due to agriculture, development and climate change, we are frenetically creating them elsewhere.
And this trend for meadows has inspired and influenced some of the most cutting-edge approaches to planting we see today – think the Olympic Park, the Super Bloom Event at the Tower of London and a huge proportion of Flower Show gardens. Meadows are beautiful, dynamic and biodiverse environments but is creating them really worth the hassle?
The process can take many years and there is no guarantee that one of your introduced meadow species won’t suddenly become dominant and wipe out the rest.
I remember reading the late, great Christopher Lloyd's book Meadows some twenty years ago and realising the complexities of creating a native meadow. The process can take many years and there is no guarantee that one of your introduced meadow species won’t suddenly become dominant and wipe out the rest. Or that underlying seeds laying dormant in the soil won't emerge and subsume your sown plants. The process is essentially about reducing fertility and suppressing grasses to allow as wide as possible a range of broad-leaf flowering species to thrive in harmony with the grassy sward. It’s a challenge! And something you need to think long and hard about before attempting.
If your garden is super fertile, shaded or consistently wet then it’s perhaps not right for you. However, if your garden is sunny, free draining and of medium to low fertility it may be worth a shot. Creating a native meadow is complex, but in essence, to make one on your own plot, involves stripping turf and introducing a range of grass and broadleaf flowering species including yellow rattle. This unassuming little plant is actually a parasite which latches onto the roots of grass species and robs them of nutrients, which suppresses their growth. This reduction in the lanky leaves of grasses allows the flowering broadleaf species to thrive among them and not be shaded out.
If you think this process sounds like a lot of hard work, you’d be right. However, there are easier ways to create meadow-like environments where flowering plants jostle for attention side by side. One increasingly popular approach is to sow an annual native or non-native ‘meadow’. A native mix may include the field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) and cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) – not truly native but naturalised in the UK for several thousand years. Sown in spring these plants will flower in around 90-100 days. A non-native mix might include California poppy (Escholzia californica) and Bishop's weed (Ammi majus) and will bloom within a similar time frame. Both can be sown into ordinary garden soil, raked out to a fine tilth.
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Another approach, with which I’ve had great success, and is the easiest meadow-making technique, is to allow an area of your lawn to go feral! In other words, you stop cutting a particular patch and let the grass grow to its natural height. This creates a long sward into which you can directly plant broadleaf perennial species which naturally make their homes in meadows – think Geranium arvensis, Lysimachia punctata and Hemerocallis. 2-3lt specimens slotted into long sward can easily compete with the grass and turn tired turf into a biodiverse meadow.
Making a truly wild native meadow takes a lot of time and hassle but it does provide a dynamic, biodiverse, long-flowering thing of beauty. However, for a whole lot less hassle and just as great a biodiversity, pollinator support and long run of flowering it’s possible to cheat with either the direct sown or slot in techniques I’ve suggested. So, are meadows really worth the hassle? My sense is yes, 100 per cent. They are beautiful, biodiverse, pollinator supporting and exceedingly long flowering. So, go sow, grow and don’t mow!
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Want to share your views on the merits and challenges of creating a meadow? Have you got a meadow section in your garden? Or do you prefer a neatly mown lawn? Email us at: letters@gardenersworld.com
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