[Inspiration] Inspiration Page – SE22 Marvellous Meadows

marvellous meadows

Autumn is the ideal time to sow a hardy meadow for beautiful displays next spring and summer

Sarah Raven wild flower meadow mix

There are two main things I want from my wild flower meadow – to look beautiful for months not weeks, with flowers coming out and going over in succession and to grow pollen-rich, insect friendly plants from early in the year to late. I want my patch to be a regular and reliable food source for the birds and the bees. That's what you'll get with these beautiful selections of my favourite easy and reliable perennial wild flowers.

country lane seed mix

Go for a walk in the countryside and you'll see this beautiful combination of flowers in succession from spring to autumn. The tried and tested selection here includes our best garden worthy native wild flowers.

meadow for birds

One of my new obsessions is sowing and growing and then leaving the plants garden birds love, to run to seed for them to feast on. Your garden will become a wild and free aviary, a truly marvellous thing.

bluebell woodland mix

A tried and tested perennial wild flower mix suitable for shade below a hedge or trees, including our stalwart woodland wild flowers, that will slowly naturalise and perpetuate from year to year.

how to grow a wildflower meadow

Join Sarah for a walk through the wildflower meadow at Perch Hill, where she shares her top tips for successfully growing perennial and annual meadows

discover more wildflower seeds >

how to create a mini wild flower meadow

When Britain hosted the Olympics in 2012, I heard almost as many people talking about the colourful meadows at the Olympic site as about Sir Chris Hoy and Mo Farah. The perennial wildflower meadows in Stratford were the work of James Hitchmough, professor of the Department of Landscape at the University of Sheffield. He designed 25 acres on the steep banks of the Lea Valley, using British native perennial wildflowers – long-season stalwarts such as spiny restharrow, betony, common toadflax and field scabious. The aim was to produce a meadow that would be as colourful as the very best examples you could find in nature. Everything was timed carefully so that it would all bloom at once, in a great exhilarating whoosh over the period of the Games. It went down magnificently.

the importance of wild flower meadows

Almost all our meadows have now been sprayed and re-sown with more productive grasses to create more hay, with others turned over to arable. It’s been estimated that by 1984, 97% of lowland semi-natural grassland had disappeared during the previous 50 years, with the surviving meadows now very fragmented and often degraded. That is a terrible destruction for us – for the beauty and richness of our countryside – but it’s a catastrophe for our native pollinators. They rely on these very plants for their life cycle, habitats and food, so it’s not surprising that with this transformation of the British countryside, we’ve seen our pollinator numbers go into across-the-board declines.