Rural Gardens
A meadow is a lawn that is managed so that plants other than grass are encouraged. This style suits rural gardens perfectly, but even a small area in a town garden, carefully managed sot hat it looks attractive and colourful and not like a piece of waste ground, provides a breath of the countryside and a valuable refuge for wildlife in an urban setting. Long grass provides food for many caterpillars and a home for insects that help to control garden pests.
Your ideal meadow may well be populated by what some people would consider weeds, but they must be the right kind of weeds, and this needs careful planning and some management. You may also wish to add more conventional border plants and bulbs and to encourage them to naturalize informally. The effects you create can also be planned to vary with the season.
The important point to remember about wildflowers is that they need porr soil, so you need to think in a completely different way to when gardening conventionally. You must not improve or add nutrients to the soil as you would in beds and borders, nor feed, scarify, aerate or top-dress as you would a lawn. The kind of regime needed to maintain a meadow is not labour-intensive, but it may encourage undesirable weeds among the wildflowers and these will need to be removed.
Because a meadow is a more natural environment than a lawn, and it is to be hoped that the plants you introduce will naturalize, account must be taken of your soil conditions and what will thrive in them. It is well worth taking a look at local wild areas, perhaps with the aid os a good wildflower guide, to see what grows well locally. A moist area will support different plants to dry chalkland, and working with your soil will make it easier to establish plants. But however authentic you wish your meadow to be, never be tempted to dig up plants from the wild.
Specialized plants such as terrestrial orchids will only flourish where conditions suit them, and are usually an indicator that the meadow is ancient and has been well cared for. An old meadow will have a richly diverse floral and become home to a wide range of insects. However even a young meadow can be a useful oasis for wildlife and with time more plants will encroach fromt he surrounding countryside.
Having a meadow is not an excuse for not mowing. It must be cut twice a year, in early summer, after spring flowers have set seed, and again in late autumn. Mowings must be raked up and removed to prevent their nutrients being added to the soil and encourageing course grasses at the expense of wildflowers. Most lawnmowers will not be able to cope with such long grass. The traditional mowing tool is a scythe, but this is a dangerous tool and a nylon-line trimmer is much safter for small areas or hire a long grass mower.
