Going wild can be enormously rewarding

Mike Burks is the managing director of The Gardens Group, with garden centres in Sherborne, Yeovil and Poundbury. Mike is a former chairman of the Garden Centre Association and is a passionate advocate of eco-friendly gardening practices.

There is some confusion around wildflower gardening as some people think that it is just a case of allowing areas to go wild whereas they will, in fact, need managing.

In fact, many ‘wild’ areas are an artificial state. Take, for example, traditional hay meadows. These were created and perpetuated by agricultural techniques whereby before the extensive use of weedkillers and artificial fertilisers, hay meadows were full of wildflowers as well as a huge range of grasses too. In fact, any species that could grow, flower and set seed before the hay was cut would be selected by the farmers habit of cutting at the same time each year. Selective weedkillers and high nitrogen fertilisers have destroyed these areas and arguably the richness of the food and vitamin source for the livestock too. Left to go “wild” these meadows would be scrubland within a few years and eventually turn to woodland.

The cornfield display with lots of poppies was again perpetuated by the farming system. Poppy seed falls to the ground at harvest and germinates the following year only when the ground is cultivated for another wheat (or other) crop. Without that cultivation the seed remains dormant. In order to get success from such systems in our own gardens we need to understand this principle. In my own garden I am allowed, from time to time, to leave areas of the lawn un-mown. I do this in graceful curves rather like the shape of an informal border. I haven’t fed the lawn for years, which reduces the vigour of the grass and helps the growth of non-grass species. In a fairly short time we were rewarded by a proliferation of lots of wildflowers such as self heal, bugle, vetches, daisies, clovers of different sorts and, early on, violets. We’ve also been lucky enough to have some Pyramidal orchids appear! The insect activity, particularly bees and butterflies have speedily grown and the scent from the clover is wonderful too. Such gardening requires a different mind-set to the traditional. It can be enormously rewarding and as well as some spectacular displays. There is also a detail that is really pleasing. At the same time, it assists nature and our struggling pollinating insects. Not only that, dare I say it, it tends to be resistant to the lack of water that may be a feature of this summer.

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