Following my blog last week about forsaking the mower for a while and letting the lawn live a little prompted some people to get in touch to ask how could they then add some colour.
The Advanced Level technique is to strip off the turf and topsoil to get rid of the nutrient-rich level and sow wildflower meadow seed.
But I know that many people just don't have the time, energy or funds to try this. So this blog ISN'T about the full-blown, 'remove the top soil, sow wildflower seed' meadow-making technique. This is all about the little things you can try with your existing lawn just to make it far more interesting to wildlife.
The good news is that, unless your lawn is recently laid, it probably already has plenty of plants in it already that are just itching to be given the chance to flower. You actually need to do very little except give them chance to flower once in a while.
There are probably clovers in there, such a brilliant nectar plant...
Self-heal is another plant whose rosettes of leaves can survive the passage of the blades, but whose pink flowers are delightful if given the chance.
You may have the purples of Ground-ivy waiting to bloom...
...or the intense blues of Germander Speedwell.
But if you want to be proactive and add yet more colour, then this autumn you could plant bulbs into the lawn for a 'spring meadow' effect, such as Snake's-head Fritillaries.
Or buy some plug plants to add into the lawn right now. They can be really cheap - as a rule of thumb, good value plugs are a pound or less each. Most of the flowers above are available, as are Cowslips, such as these that I photographed last week on a grassy bank in a garden...
With such a palette of possibilities, wouldn't it be lovely to think that the typical lawn of the future will be technicolor.
And on our Give your Mower a Rest webpage, I've set out the ways to create a spring or summer meadow. But if it is just a case of leaving the lawn unmown once in the season, then that's a great start,
If you want to drop by my RSPB wildlife gardening blog, it is updated every Friday, and I'd love to see you there - www.rspb.org.uk/community/blogs/hfw
If anyone is interested, the Wildlife Gardening Forum's summer conference (which is in Oxford) is on garden meadows - booking is here www.wlgf.org/conference_booker.php
Hi Russ. Top marks for all that effort of removing all that fertile top foot of soil. I'd be very interested to know how you get on.
Hi Dotty. It sounds like you sowed a meadow mix on prepred soil - is that right? Did you then keep the mix mown in year one? If you've got any photos, I'd be interested to see what your hawkweed is that is causing the problems. As I said in my blog, the sowing from scratch is the A-level of meadow-making, which is why for most people I advocate just tweaking the existing lawn, but fair play to you for trying.
I have a 10 meter strip along one side. I have removed the top foot and the second 12 inches put the topsoil into the bottom and the subsoil back on top of the first square metre. Very hard work! Have sown with Wildflower grass on firmed soil and wildflower seed separate on looser soil. Then covered with netting hung from curtain wire!I'm trying to find a happy medium between colour, wildlife and effort !
While I agree that planting a 'meadow' would be fine, keeping it looking like a meadow is quite tricky, it seems to me. We planted a meadow mix in our front garden, where we already had some clover and self-heal. It was okay the first year but following that we have become over-run with what appears to be some sort of hawkweed. It has choked out most of the self-heal, I can't see any clover and we're hard pressed to find the grass! Last year, our 'meadow' was just a sea of what looked like spindly dandelions! My advice would be to thoroughly research what you need to do to keep your meadow meadow-like. We haven't decided on a course of action to sort out the problem yet - but it'll possibly involve a pond! Thank goodness our speedwell is growing in the cracks around our wall...
Dotty