Boring lawns - your days are numbered!

Last week I attended the Wildlife Gardening Forum, held at the Natural History Museum in London.

That’s eighty or so wildlife gardeners packed into one lecture theatre, everybody from the Royal Horticultural Society, Natural England and the Wildlife Trusts to local authorities, horticulturalists and private gardeners.

I love it. It’s a great chance to keep in touch with the latest thinking and projects about gardening for wildlife, and it is open to anyone who would like to participate (you do have to pay to go, though!).

This meeting was themed around lawns for wildlife, and Dr Steve Head who organises it all had done a great job in drawing together all sorts of people with expertise in the area.

So we had Dr Ken Thompson, him of the BUGS project in Sheffield, where the influential study of 61 gardens found an average of 24 plant species per lawn, amazing diversity. It also showed that lawns occupy about 60% of garden space.

We had Lionel Smith from the University of Reading doing an amazing study into new types of flowering lawns - ie areas you walk on and which get cut, but which have colourful flowers in them, native and non-native.

And we had Nigel Dunnett talking about the eye-popping meadows that are being created in the Olympic Park (which I get the chance to see when I go to watch the high diving - yay!).

The strong impression I got was that over the next few years we will see all sorts of new options coming out that we gardeners can try if we want something other than just a square of green in that 60% of your garden.

So, just as a quick reminder to what you can already do on a 'lawn' area, you can:

• Cultivate it and sow annual seed mixes - this is the cornfield effect, with poppies, Corn Marigold, or even Moroccan Toadflax and Coreopsis. This is the Monet effect, with relatively short-lived colour on a fertile soil. Sow in either September (poppies do well) or early spring. I took this photo at Hidcote two weeks ago:

• Plant bulbs in your lawn and have a spring meadow that you don't mow until July (and then keep mowing for the rest of the season). This was at Waterperry Gardens in April:

• Mow your lawn until April, and then let the lawn grow into a summer meadow, starting cutting again in late September.
• Or for the real flower-rich meadow, remove the topsoil to reduce fertility and sow a wild meadow mix in September, including Yellow Rattle seeds to help suppress the grasses. This is an orchid-filled nature reserve called Eades Meadow that I visited in June 2009.