Grow a low-carbon wildflower meadow

You might think that a garden wildflower meadow is something that has to be carefully designed. However, much of what you need is probably already there.

Waiting beneath your clipped lawn is a riot of wildflowers and prairie-like grasses that will burst into life as soon as you let them.

What's more, when you stop weekly mowing, your lawn starts on its journey to becoming natural grassland – one of the world's most efficient carbon sinks, able to lock up over 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare.
 

What is a meadow?

One of the loveliest types of grassland is the flower-filled hay meadow – agricultural pasture left unmown and ungrazed for part of the year, to produce hay. Inside our gardens, it’s possible to create a patch of meadow that could be the last refuge for some of our rarest and most beautiful species.

Hay meadows are an increasingly rare sight. In the UK, for example, about 97 per cent of them have disappeared since the 1930s, when farmers ploughed to make way for growing crops, or “improved” them with fertilisers until the grass grew thick and ousted the wildflowers.

Avoiding the use of fertilisers allows wildflowers such as these ox-eye daisies to compete with the grasses

Wildlife havens

If you allow them space to grow, you’ll find swathes of wildflowers will flourish. And as our gardens fill with wildflowers, they come alive.

Meadows are among the best of wildlife habitats, with nectar-rich flowers and undisturbed, tussocky grass to shelter solitary bees and ground beetles. They attract bees, butterflies, and other pollinating insects, with many, like marbled white and meadow blue butterflies, found nowhere else.
 

Counting the carbon cost

Seedlings or young plants grown singly in small modules, with the advantage that they can be transplanted with minimal root disturbance. Bedding plants and young veg plants are often sold as plug plants of various sizes, with smaller ones requiring more aftercare. They usually need to be potted up and grown on indoors until large enough to plant outside.

plug plants

Buttercups make a colourful spectacle in spring and summer

​Home-grown beauty

Knapweeds are colourful, wildlife-friendly native flowers which bloom for ages

Wild orchids can sometimes appear in lawns if you stop mowing in spring and summer

Once the grasses retreat, you’ll find the first wave of more common wildflowers is joined by other, spectacular wildlings, such as knapweeds, campions, or lady’s smock – and maybe, if you’re lucky, an orchid.

Discovering new blow-ins becomes a constant delight. It’s the meadow that nature would have created, tailor-made for your garden.
 

How to create a low-carbon meadow

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