Financial Times 2001

Meadows of Medieval Fantasy by Anne Wareham

One result of all the publicity about "wild" gardening is that it has encouraged people to look benignly on my experiments in that direction. When I first left the meadow uncut I was asked if I intended to keep geese, but people are much more sophisticated about it now. It is a challenging form of gardening, requiring a willingness to respond to the way the garden unfolds and to adjust methods appropriately. The same practice in different places or even in different years produces different results, making prescription impossible. Ten years of mowing three times a year and removing the cut grass has blessed me with a meadow remarkably full of flowers. The same process left another garden I've seen with a meadow mostly of fine grasses. On more fertile, wet soil it could have created a wilderness of nettles and docks.

My initial enthusiasm was fuelled by the idea of growing tough cultivated plants in grassy, weedy bits of the garden, thus ending the chore of weeding that patch for good. It sounds unlikely, but interesting results are emerging. Oriental poppies seemed a good bet nice tough plants which would tolerate being mowed after flowering, solving the problem of what to do about the space they leave. I started them from seed, which is why I have salmon pink. The red failed to germinate. Perhaps no one will be surprised to learn that they struggled to survive at first. Feeling faintly foolish I fed and watered them. They still seemed to find life hard work, so late the next summer I killed off all the grass with glyphosate. This clearly reduced the competition and not just for the poppies.

The next spring the bank was a mass of bluebells, followed by an equal mass of creeping buttercups and, not massed, but thriving and promising, oriental poppies.I was surprised and relieved to see that the colour combination worked. This was especially fortunate given that this grouping is beneath a laburnum, as yellow as the buttercup, which times its flowering with the poppies.A particularly steep bank in the garden presented a special problem besides the impossibility of mowing it in spring it is covered with wood anemones, followed by violets. These clearly had to be accommodated by whatever regime I adopted. I looked up "plants for naturalising in grass" in Graham Stuart Thomas's 'Perennial Garden Plants' and ordered lots of seed. The resulting plants were duly introduced among the grass. They were mostly large, somewhat top heavy, thuggish plants.

I then realised that the classic meadow of medieval fantasy had a great many tiny flowers scattered through the grass quite a different picture. Clearly the way to establish such flowers was to get out the glyphosate again. This time the deed was done in early spring just before the wood anemones emerged. The anemones clearly loved the new space and freedom, but have never looked so awful, as they were now surrounded by large patches of yellowing grass.

Meadow Summer 2005. © Charles Hawes

However, when the grass was dead there were a lot of spaces available for planting. I filled these with the toughest and most vigorous of the hardy geraniums, with Geum Mrs Bradshaw (I was determined to get a good scarlet in somewhere), Campanula lactiflora and Campanula rapunculoides saponaria, montbretia and solidago. There are also white shrub roses, which I find quite wonderful emerging from this mass.

But it is the weeds that have made this bank one of my favourite parts of the garden. They also thrived on the removal of the coarse grasses. Stitchwort, clover, meadow vetchling, tormentil, yarrow and common knapweed are all troublesome weeds elsewhere, but a positive delight here. The classy touch is the orchids. It seems unlikely that the bank will need weed killing again as there is little space for coarser plants to intrude, but I will keep watch.

Wild Garden © Charles Hawes

Such gardening helps restore the much lamented sense of place; it is a product of local conditions and whatever is there before you start. It also makes me treasure the dry and less fertile parts of the garden, as these colourful weeds and the finer grasses prefer a starved soil. Other similarly nitrogen free areas which are more accessible to the mower look extraordinarily pretty on just one cut a year.

Areas characterised by a certain amount of wildness benefit from having clearly defined boundaries the informal set within the formal. After all, a field usually has a hedge. It is the same principle as mowing a path through a meadow the inclusion of the cared for and disciplined area conveys clearly that this is gardened, not neglected.

Published in the Financial Times 17th March 2001

Meadow in early summer. © Charles Hawes