You can buy perennial mixes, green roof mixes (chives, oregano, white stonecrop, tunic flower) and a wide range of annual flower mixes, which might include Shirley poppy, Californian poppy, cornflower, fairy toadflax and larkspur. Dunnett describes these mixes as "impressionistic associations", quite different effect to a traditional meadow. So this is not so much a meadow as a seasonal flush of annual wild flowers, a cornfield without the corn.Īt The Old Rectory in Duntisbourne Rouse, Gloucestershire, Mary Keen has replaced her veg with what she calls a "Sheffield meadow" sown with one of the mixes developed by Dr Nigel Dunnett of the University of Sheffield and available from Pictorial Meadows (01). Each year, Alan and Graham top up the self-set seed with fresh supplies, adjusting the balance between the different species at the same time. ![]() In November, any perennial weeds are treated with weedkiller and the field is ploughed again. ![]() The whole crop is cut down in October, by which time the flowers have seeded. They ploughed the area to be sown, harrowed it and sowed seed of annual cornfield flowers: scarlet poppies, blue cornflowers, the yellow corn marigold (Chrysanthemum segetum) and white-flowered corn camomile. In most pre-packaged meadow mixes, the dominant grasses are likely to be crested dog's tail, chewings fescue and red fescue, with grasses making up 80 per cent of the total.Īt The Old Vicarage, East Ruston, Norfolk (01692 650432), Alan Gray and Graham Robeson have used a different technique. Look out for the bents, Agrostis canina and Agrostis tenuis, crested dog's tail, quaking grass, sheep's fescue, meadow foxtail, wavy hair grass and meadow grasses such as Poa trivialis and Poa pratensis. If you are seeding a meadow garden from scratch, avoid rye grasses and other vigorous species such as cock's foot, tall fescue and Yorkshire fog (Holcus lanatus). To the uninitiated, grass is grass as long as it is green, but there are more than 150 kinds listed in Francis Rose's definitive Guide to Grasses, Sedges, Rushes and Ferns (Viking £35). By the third season, you may find you have got the wrong sort of grass and only bullies such as moon daisies can compete with it. The nettles and docks and hogweeds you thought you had got rid of will start creeping back. In the second season, the proportion of wild flowers to grass will decrease dramatically. There are often searing displays when new by-passes are made. Roadworks are the best places for poppies now. Where grass is permanently established, as it will be after the first year of a newly sown flowery mead, poppies die out. This is why they like cornfields, where after a neck-and-neck race with the corn, they seed themselves, ready to bob up after the next round of ploughing. ![]() Poppies will leap up brightly in the first year if they are sown on a freshly prepared bare plot, but they are annuals, lasting only one year and favouring newly disturbed ground. But there is a double misunderstanding at work here. We have only to broadcast a few packets of seed, then put away the mower for ever. Driven by a kind of cosmic guilt, we wallow in visions of red poppies fluttering among feathery grass heads in our own back yards. Managing them on the ground is another matter. Flowery meads are all very well in pictures where the grass never grows.
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