Wild Flowers

The big happening this week was the sudden leap from a sedate and pretty spring garden with its  neat patches of forget-me-nots and campion to a garden of  aggressive Tryffids. I've been clearing a few spaces in which to plant some new foxgloves and campanulas and there's already enough torn-out greenery to almost fill up the compost heap. It's always a bit unnerving when the garden does this. You feel some of the garden perennials must be suffocating under the heavy canopy of lush green. But it does provide welcome cover and nutrients for the wildlife I am befriending and I'd rather the beds were overfull  than leaving bits of bare ground. 

In amongst this lush curtain  shine out the brightest, yellowest, most optimistic of flowers - the sort of things remembered from childhood but rarer nowadays.  Dandelions have a truly gorgeous egg yolk colour with a slightly darker centre. I do admit to picking the flowers before they turn into dandelion clocks and spread their seeds around. 

 

                                Dandelions have a fantastic colour with slightly darker centres 

Buttercup flowers have that particularly intense shiny yellow which reflects if you hold it under your chin to see if you like butter (remember that?). 

Meadow buttercup with its buttery colour

The Welsh poppies, given to me by a friend years ago, seed themselves every year all over the garden with a tissue paper yellow (and orange). 

Welsh poppies 

                                                   

The other big happening was the arrival of 50 plug plants of wild flowers - just enough to fill up one square metre of the lawn. This follows the disaster of my sowing wild flower seeds in the lawn in the autumn of 2019 when I wasn't able to clear the grass as advised and I knew from the start it wouldn't work. And It didn't. No wild flowers at all. So I thought I'd try the plugs. The soil under the grass was wet and sticky. It took ages  to dib a hole for each plug. I added sand  to help the roots find a hold. The pack is designed for clay soil and there are ten different kinds of wild flower. (By the time I got to the 35th plug I was exhausted so I planted the rest in a pot mixing the compost with sand and perlite.)

35 tiny wildflowers in a patch of lawn

With their protection

I covered the lawn patch with chicken wire and over that a piece of horticultural felt and held it all down with bricks to stop the foxes and squirrels for having fun with it. The tiny plants already seem to be settling in so I have high hopes of at least one square metre of wild flower meadow this year. (This pack came from Naturescape via a favourite vegetable supplier of mine called Rocket Gardens.)

10 varieties of wild flower left over from the lawn

All this sounds a bit Quixotic, but Plantlife, the wild flower conservation charity expresses it like this: "Put quite simply, plants need pollinators and pollinators need plants. However, we know that both are in sharp decline.... Since the 1930s we have lost nearly 7.5 million acres of flower-rich meadow and pasture. Just 1% of our countryside provides the floral feast for pollinators...Habitats such as lawns have become increasingly important. With 15 million gardens in Britain, our lawns have the potential to become major sources of nectar. Every flower counts."

NB. Every Flower Counts is a countrywide survey of wild flowers in lawns, taking place from  22 - 31 May. If you would like to take part,  find out how to do it at plantlife.org.uk/everyflowercounts