Sowing a mini-meadow

There is a magic to a packet of wildflower meadow seeds, a whole bright world infolded in an envelope.

Meadows are as rich in cultural and emotional associations as they are in floral diversity. Hypnotherapists entreat us to imagine ourselves in a meadow beside a bubbling brook; it is where spring lambs gambol, Instagram influencers pose, and they frame dreamy cottages on chocolate boxes. Meadows make us feel free, calm, childlike, joyous. They are an antidote to a landscape that seems increasingly controlled, urban, grey, monotonous and bland.

Importantly, they provide places for pollinators and beneficial insects to live and forage. While they’ve been part of the Diggers offering for years and have their roots in the romantic cottage garden tradition, wildflower meadows have been reimagined with the rise of naturalistic garden design.

Urban impact

On the large scale we see this in the urban flower meadows that accompanied the 2012 London Olympics and the current Super Bloom for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, a spectacular immersive meadow in the moat of the Tower of London.

The Diggers Club, with the City of Melbourne, produced two meadows in the CBD; a massive field at Birrarung Marr in 2014 and a pocket one in University Square in 2019. For Council it was a step away from intensive and expensive turf and annual display beds, offering more than bland, low maintenance bark chip shrubberies.

Meadows also work in micro. The green deserts of modern suburbia cry out for a bit of joyous disruption. In the land of mechanical hedgers, edgers and blowers, even the smallest patch of free-flowering shaggy meadow makes a life-affirming statement.

For gardeners, their low cost and maintenance comes with benefits. The mix of flowers means a long-flowering display compared to the one hit wonder of annual bedding. They create community – where I’ve planted even a small patch of wildflowers, they are always a conversation starter with passers-by, usually beginning with a “wow”.

In the home garden they can replace that monoculture we call lawn. In new gardens they provide instant results while waiting for trees and perennials to establish. At Heronswood we use meadow mixes as quick infills between the permanent plantings; they fill seasonal gaps stitching the garden together.

Preparation and timing

An annual meadow is a homage to wildflowers of the cornfield, minus the corn, made up of a suite of tough, yet spectacular flowers from around the world. These annuals are adapted to disturbance, the first to appear with rain after drought, bushfire or cultivation. When we plant our meadows, we should bear this in mind; they are not the perennials of pasture adapted to competition with grasses, they seize the windows of opportunity when competing plants have been removed.

Simply raking over your lawn and sprinkling a packet of wildflower mix does not a meadow make. All effort needs to go into soil preparation. Remove perennial weeds and grasses, particularly the running sort like couch grass and kikuyu. Cultivate and create a good tilth, raked fine with clods broken. Alternatively, for a no dig approach, blanket weeds thoroughly with cardboard (or similar), then weed free compost to a depth of at least 10cm and sow into that.

Timing is also critical. Constant moisture during the germination period is crucial so, in temperate climates, autumn through to early spring is the sowing window (unless irrigation is available). After that they are self-sufficient. Sow a spring meadow in late autumn or winter; for a summer display sow in spring.

Be creative

Sowing in wavy lines allows you to weed in between and easily discern what you have sown from emergent weeds without looking too much like a crop of carrots. To entertain my kids, I sowed seeds in a spiral, spreading a mulch of rock dust between the rows both to suppress weeds and make a path. Really, it was a cunning plan to get them to run around and through the meadow, but not on it! I have also had great success in evenly broadcasting and letting the density of planting out-compete the weeds. Remember you are replicating a wildflower meadow; the odd thistle is less of a threat to the look than too much hoeing and gardening. The key to the natural look is the individual flowers seen as part of one seamless swathe.

While getting many square metres out of a few grams of seed is one of the greatest strengths of sowing a meadow, it also creates a challenge. Sowing a little packet that includes minuscule poppy seeds reminds me of the ‘cocaine sneeze’ from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall; so much lost in one gesundheit! I mix the packet with dry sand in a bucket to extend and even out the coverage. Once your flowers fade, cut down and start the cycle again in autumn.

Written by Bill Bampton, head gardener at Heronswood.