Meadow Mania

‘Let’s just make it a meadow’.

When thinking about landscaping around the house we had an image in our minds of a simple wooden structure nestled into a meadow, flowers and grasses moving gently in the breeze. No paths, no borders, no annuals, no weeding, no mowing. So natural. So simple. What I know now is that planting a meadow is a design decision equivalent to ‘let’s just paint it white’. It might seem simple, but that simplicity disguises a fiendish process.

We started in autumn 2021 with some incredibly expensive bags of wildflower seed. Lynn, from the Devon Wildlife Trust, had reminded us to get the seeds spread before the winter solstice. We let the kids help us with the spreading, which meant that distribution was uneven at best. That first year was a wash out. Some yellow rattle, but not much else appeared. We decided there was too much shillet and not enough soil. The soil needs to be poor for wildflowers, but we had maybe taken this a step too far.

Autumn 2022 was our next opportunity and luckily this time Lynn had some seeds she could share from the Avon Valley rewilding project. We painstakingly picked and raked away the shillet and made sure there was a dusting of top soil for the seeds. The results started to show in spring 2023, and as the build finished we were able to seed much closer around the house. All the grass had been stripped back by diggers as part of the house build, leaving the exposed earth that wildflower grasses and seeds need. This time, we had veritable meadow mania. The original seeding took hold with oxeye daisies, wild carrot and red clover. The spring seeding became a riot of annual wildflowers: cornflowers, poppies, chamomile, daisies and marigolds. I didn’t see a single person who could walk past it without stopping to stand and stare for a moment. As our postman said ‘you just give nature half a chance, and look what happens…’ so natural. So simple. I decided not to mention the diggers.