Everyone wants a meadow – hazy, and romantic, seemingly low-maintenance, child- and pet-friendly and highly Instagrammable. They feature high up on wishlists of garden design clients, are fantastic for pollinators and make everyone feel like they’re living in a Toast catalogue.
There’s no doubt that a meadow in full swing is a beautiful thing. But their seeming simplicity belies a complexity that you could spend years studying – and many have. I did a course at Great Dixter last year run by the inimitable Fergus Garrett, and like all good education, rather than leaving feeling like I had mastered the subject, the experience opened a door to reveal how much more there was to learn.
To start with the basics, a meadow is an open, semi-natural habitat dominated by non-woody herbaceous plants like grasses and wildflowers, with sparse or absent tree and shrub cover. They are maintained thanks to mowing, grazing, fire, or seasonal flooding that prevent them from succeeding (growing) into forests. They don’t become meadows by doing nothing – they become meadows thanks to a carefully choreographed ballet of mowing (or grazing or fire) that allows species to flower, set seed and regrow – a process that is at once simple and easy to get wrong.
The meadow of your imagination is likely a biodiverse wildflower meadow – a delicate sea of poppies, corncockles and marigolds dancing in the breeze – which rely on nutrient-poor soils; not your average garden topsoil. This is because when soil fertility is low, aggressive, fast-growing grasses (which would swamp the flowers) cannot dominate. This lack of nutrients prevents any single species from claiming the whole area, allowing delicate wildflowers and specialised perennial herbs to thrive.
But most of us don’t have low-fertility top soil and sheep to graze, so how to create a meadow at home?
If you are blessed with a large paddock or field in which to experiment and take your time, then the first step is to tackle the boisterous grasses. Sowing Yellow Rattle, Rhinanthus minor, a semi-parasitic wildflower, will suppress the grasses, allowing other species to thrive – there may well be wildflower species lurking in the seed bank ready for their moment to shine, given the opportunity.
However, as Charlotte Denne from Kent Seeds – who supply a wide range of wildflower seeds and mixes – explains: ‘Scattering seed straight onto existing lawn or turf won't work, because the grass is already established and holding every advantage. Seeds also need direct contact with bare soil to germinate. Dropped onto a thatch of turf, they will just sit on the surface, dry out or get eaten.’
New species need access to light and resources, so scarifying (scraping back the thatch and moss) will allow them room to emerge, and airborne seeds to germinate.
Next, you have to be prepared to be patient. A meadow is long-term project which can take years to establish and find its balance – you might have a year where you’re awash with knapweed and little else, or a few years where it looks patchy and more like long grass than the meadow of your bucolic fantasy, Charlotte explains. This is not failure, it is all part of the process – you must learn how to sit back and watch the dynamic, ever-shifting dance unfold.
If, like Sarah Meade – co-owner and head gardener of Yeo Valley – your designated spot for a meadow is nitrogen rich (as opposed to poor fertility), you might need to do as she has and rethink what a meadow is entirely. Understanding your soil and planting in the style of a meadow – rather than sowing meadow species in the wrong spot – can be extremely effective.
Perhaps it’s an area with a few shrubs (in Sarah’s case, Buddleja) and underplanted with masses of bulbs (for example Camassia quamash and Fritillaria meleagris, both of which love moisture-rich soils). Great swathes of these will produce as much magic and delight as the more traditional wildflower meadow and are tailored to the garden you have.
And for those of us with neither swathes of land nor poor fertility soils, there are still opportunities to create a meadow on a much smaller scale. Butter Wakefield has created a mini-meadow down the centre of her London garden using meadow turf, mown into a sharp rectangle in pleasing contrast to the abundance and beauty within.
I have just laid a meadow on our new kitchen extension roof – an alternative to the more familiar sedum roofs, but with much more life and personality. I plan to plant bulbs into it this autumn for spring and I already have a carpet of Bladder Campion, Ribwort Plantain and Clover, with the pollinators to match, which I can enjoy from my bed with tea in the morning.
With a bit of creative thinking, meadows can be deployed and enjoyed in all manner of spaces – from city centres to country estates. They are an important piece of the ecological mosaic and can deliver as much joy to us humans as they do food and habitat to the non-human natural world. And there is no better time to start creating a meadow than autumn. So dig out the scarifier and order some seed – your time and patience will be well-spent.
