Grow a low-carbon meadow

You might think that a garden 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.

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 -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

Making a meadow the conventional way can be an intensive process. You’ll need to use machines to strip off the nutrient-rich top layer of the soil, releasing much of the carbon within it back into the atmosphere. Buying seeds or ( ready to plant), which are commercially produced off-site, carries a carbon cost too.

A low-carbon meadow, on the other hand, adds almost nothing to your garden’s carbon footprint, as it makes the most of the wildflowers already growing in your garden. You probably know them as weeds, but buttercups, clovers and dandelions are highly valuable food plants for bees and other pollinating insects.

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

Make the cut:

Scalp your grass in early autumn with the mower blades on their lowest setting. This weakens the grass and exposes occasional bare patches of soil. Remove all clippings.

Get help from plant allies:

Sow hemi-parasitic wildflowers onto the bare soil; once established, they weaken grasses, helping wildflowers dominate. Suitable choices include yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor) and eyebright (Euphrasia nemorosa).

Step away from the mower:

Don’t mow throughout spring and summer. Large natives such as hogweed, thistles and nettles are fantastic for wildlife, providing food and shelter, so tolerate them as far as possible but remove selectively, by hand, if they get .

Come and cut again:

Take an annual cut in late summer and rake up the “hay” to remove and add to your heap. It may take some years to achieve a pleasing balance of grasses and wildflowers, but the result will be a long-lasting, well-established meadow.