Dreams of a colourful meadow

I love my little bit of meadow, even if it is mostly grasses flowering at this time of year. The meadow is a small square area bisected by two roughly perpendicular cut paths. Just before the paths are cut each week they are sprinkled generously with daisies, which happily re-appear within a day or two of the chop.

A month or so ago, the area was more colourful since it was covered in wild daffodils, primroses, cowslips, celandines and a few precious snake’s head fritillaries.

Now the grass has grown tall and has patches of cow parsley punching through it, together with some clumps of camassia (just about to flower) and is all wrapped up with common vetch scrambling through the stalks.

Later, knapweed, chicory and scabious will dominate and insects & butterflies will flit around the patch during the long hot days of summer (I can dream of that too).

But there is an inbetween time when it is just a little colourless and dull. So I have a plan and I’ve no idea how it will work, but for the last couple of days I’ve been digging up turf, in strips, from the thickest, grassy parts of the meadow.

And then, in the trenches, I have been adding a little top soil and sowing a mixture of annual flowers from Pictorial Meadows called ‘Classic’ meadow mix. Their stated sowing density is roughly 2g per sq metre, so to achieve an even spread I mix the seeds with sand and then I can see where I’ve been:

Pictorial Meadows supply a number of annual (and indeed perennial) mixes and colour combinations, but I chose their ‘Classic’ mixture, since I know from trialling it a couple of years ago at Wimpole that I liked it’s colour evolution through the seasons and that it looked good right through until late October.

The mixture contains about 12 different species and starts with fairly cool colours: whites, blues and purple hues (from ammi, cornflower, linaria and phacelia)

‘Classic’ mix in July

The mix heats up with eschscholzias and poppies …

‘Classic’ mix in September

and then burns to a conclusion with reds and oranges and yellows from flax, coreopsis and rudbeckia.

‘Classic’ mix in October

So, I am hoping that it will look interesting threaded through our meadow patch and will pull even more butterflies and insects into the area.

Fingers crossed!