How to create a wild flower meadow from an existing lawn
Wildflower meadows are beautiful, wildlife-friendly and low- maintenance once established — but they need help to get started.
As soon as you consider converting a lawn into a wildflower meadow, stop applying feed, moss treatments, weedkiller, pesticides and lawn sand. You won’t ever need to use these again, in fact, they’ll all be very harmful to your meadow. Stop watering and mowing too and see which plants you already have — you could well be surprised by the number which appear. Unless you’ve regularly used weedkiller it’s quite possible that daisies, buttercups, self-heal, plantains, clover, birdsfoot trefoil and even orchids will soon be blooming.
Make a note of which areas have the lushest growth, where the ground seems drier if any sections are in shade some or all of the day. That will help you chose the best positions to plant any wildflowers you add.
Think about whether you want the whole area to become a meadow, or if you’d like to keep some mown grass, and if you’ll want access paths. Having mown paths or borders or keeping one area…
