Could your lawn become a meadow?

One of the beauties of giving nature a home in your garden is that there are things you can do that are very simple but, if you like a challenge, you can try some pretty tricky things too.

My blog this week is a tribute to a couple of friends who, I’m delighted to say, have given one of the most difficult things in wildlife gardening a try and delivered superb results. It is like the wildlife gardening equivalent of the quadruple toe-loop in ice dance or doing the splits in Strictly – they have turned their lawn into a wildlife meadow.

There are three main ways of creating a wildlife meadow, all of which can be mixed and matched. The overall aim is to stem the vigour of grasses which can otherwise overpower all the meadow flowers you were hoping for.

• Method 1 is to simply let your existing lawn grow long and see what flowers are in there, removing all the cut grass each rare occasion you mow to gradually reduce the fertility. You can boost your efforts with a few plug plants of favourite meadow flowers.
• Method 2 is drastic – it involves removing all of your turf and taking it somewhere else! This gets you down to subsoil where you can sow your meadow from seed and add plug plants.
• Method 3 involves using nature’s own magic grass-suppressor – Yellow Rattle. Once found in meadows across the UK, this annual ‘weed’ taps into the roots of grasses, helping itself to some of the water and nutrients the grass is trying to use and so sapping it of its brutishness.
  

And it is a combination of Methods 1 and 3 that my friends tried, with the following wonderful result.

Now I should quickly explain that in midsummer this would have been chock full of Yellow Rattle flowers, an excellent nectar source for bumblebees. What you see now are the dried seed pods of the Rattle in what I think still makes a pleasant and interesting tapestry.

You can hopefully spot there is barely any grass to be seen because, in amongst the Rattle, Bird’s-foot Trefoil and Lady’s Bedstraw have prospered. The former is the foodplant of the caterpillars of the Common Blue butterfly and, sure enough, there in the meadow were a couple of males, a little tatty at the end of their season but still gorgeous.

There’s the chance too that Six-spot Burnet Moths, whose larvae also feed on the Trefoil, will take up residence, while Hummingbird Hawkmoths may breed on the Bedstraw. The 'meadow' also has glorious Cowslips in spring and Harebells in autumn.

The Rattle, being an annual, needs the turf scuffing a little each year to let the seed make contact with the soil. but then can be left to do its thing, topped up with a bit of supplementary seed each spring.

The next goal for this meadow is to plant Horseshoe Vetch; it is the foodplant of Chalkhill Blue and Adonis Blue butterflies which breed within half a mile of the garden. Wouldn't that be something?!

Have you given wildlife meadows a go? Once established, the management regime is quite simple, mowing only from July through to the end of the growing season (for a spring meadow) or from September (for a summer meadow), and removing the cuttings for compost after they've lain on the ground a couple of days.