Creating a New Wildflower Meadow
Amongst parallel projects on the former sheep farm in mid-Montgomeryshire, the owners were keen to establish a wildflower meadow on the ‘near pasture.’ Having inherited formerly improved grass pasture, this needed cutting or grazing for management. Earlier, they had ‘borrowed’ sheep from the neighbouring farm, either accidentally due to failing fences or deliberately to keep the grass down. Occasionally the neighbours had taken a silage cut early in the autumn. As we developed the property, prioritising fixing the fences, renovating existing and planting new hedging, and planting 500 native trees through a Woodland Trust initiative. Sheep became less welcome on the property unless contained, as they scratch themselves against the saplings and guards and nibble on the buds. Sheep also preferentially graze on wildflowers, and are therefore broadly incompatible with establishing a wildflower meadow.
While there is no one right way to plant a wildflower meadow, there are two broad approaches to changing a grass pasture into a meadow. Both approaches address the issues that grasses are typically more vigorous than wildflowers, and therefore supress establishment, and that grass responds to nutrients and regular mowing, while wildflowers require nutrient poor soil and selective mowing. The first method is to ‘front-load’ the investment of time and money by either killing the grass (i.e. glyphosphate) or even scraping down to the soil and completing large-scale planting of seed. This method produces the quickest results but lacks refinement and, unless you have ready access to the required equipment (tractor, flail, seeder) it rapidly becomes expensive. This initial cost includes large amounts of seed, which often proves difficult to source locally.
The second approach, adopted for this project, takes a more patient ‘evolution over revolution’ philosophy, and involves incrementally reducing grass vigour and nutrient levels in the soil. To accomplish this, we kept to a specific mowing routine and sowed yellow rattle over two years.
The hero of the show, seen in both adjacent images, is rhinanthus minor, or yellow rattle. This plant is flora’s equivalent to fauna’s beaver, transforming the environment. It is hemiparasitical, essentially predating grass and reducing growth, allowing other species to establish without being outcompeted. Initially dominant, yellow rattle dominates the meadow, but over a couple of years other species become established.
