How to create a Wildflower Meadow: Wildlife Garden Design Guide – Episode 4.

By admin | May 15, 2022 |

If you want to plant a wildflower meadow then award winning Garden Ninja shows you the easiest way to encourage wildlife to your garden with a meadow. No matter what size garden, I show you how to create a wildflower meadow with minimal fuss!

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Presented by Garden Ninja, Manchesters Garden Designer and blogger Lee Burkhill. He’s an RHS Award-winning Chelsea garden designer and expert panellist on BBC Radio Manchester’s Saturday morning garden phone in.

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Today’s wildlife design guides going to be all about how to sow your own perennial wildflower meadow. So come on let’s get cracking!

So it comes to planting up a wildflower meadow there are a few options that you’re going to be faced with. Now the first option is the annual
wildflower meadow this means that every year needs to be seeded for new growth each year at the end of the season the plants are the flowers will die back. So you’re really relying on self seeding.

The second option is a herbaceous perennial wildflower meadow and although it may not have every color under the rainbow in it it’s far easier both to establish and to look after. Once you’ve got it established there’s very little that you need to do other than sit back and enjoy it! So come on let me show you more.

So the first set of plants I’m going to show you of these. Elecampane also known as in Inula helenium which are related to other Heleniums. Now these plants are beautiful and they send up these huge yellow ragged daisy-like flowers they do get quite tall so they will add a load of drama to a meadow.

So the next plant is this Leucanthemum vulgare, the oxeye Daisy and if you ask someone to draw a meadow you probably found that they drew these! They have white daisy like flowers they grow to
about 80 centimetres to a meter.

So the next plant is this beauty and it’s a mallow. Malva sylvestris it always reminds me of sweet shops because it’s quite tall but it has these sweet shop pinks and light purple flowers on it.

So down here we’ve got Blue Hyssop. Hyssopus officinalis and I’m adding this into the mix now it’s a semi evergreen herbaceous.

So the next plant is this one which is Polemonium caeruleum, otherwise known as Jacob’s Ladder. Now this is another blue plant and it sends up these little leaves that look like a ladder which is where it gets its name from.

The next plant is Yarrow. Achillea millefolium but you’ll know from my exploding atom garden and I absolutely love this species. Now it can take over in lawns so do you take care but it will give you an incredible show of these umbellifers flowers throughout the summer.

I’m also going to be using Chicory in my meadow mix. The reason for that is it’s got these really attractive looking salad
like leaves.

Now this is Toadflax. Linaria vulgaris and it’s a parasitic plant and what that means is it will leach nutrients off
surrounding grasses

Now all of these plants have been grown in my greenhouse it’s not particularly big it’s not very fancy but it does show that no matter what size garden you’ve got you could grow all of these yourself
and I found it’s far better to grow these from seed because it’s cheaper but when it comes to planting them out which I’m going to show you next you can really carefully consider the position of these plants which ultimately means you are going to have a far nicer wildflower meadow so come on let’s go!

I’m going to use a really sharp trowel lifts the turf off where the plants are going to go so that they’ve got a fighting chance and then plop them in. I’ve already mowed this so it’s already out quite a low setting you don’t want the grass to be competing too much with these plants so no and a really short setting and then when you pop them in make sure you remove their little circle of turf that you’re going to be replacing them with. So I’m going to be putting in around 400 plants into this space if you’ve got a smaller garden that’s not a problem either you simply scale down the amount of plants.

Now these are going to take a number of months before they get established and it’s going to be next year until you start to see that look at the wildflower meadow with all the flowers but it’s well worth the time and investment. I’m going to make sure that I trim around these plants to make sure the grass doesn’t out-compete them until
they’re established you also need to make sure like with any new plant that you keep them well watered.