How do I turn part of my lawn into a wildflower meadow?

The commonest reason a home meadow fails is that the soil is too good. A lawn that has been fed for years is rich in nitrogen, and grass responds to nitrogen far more vigorously than wildflowers do, so the flowers get shaded out within two seasons. Everything in the method below is about reducing fertility and weakening grass, not about adding flowers. Scattering a packet of meadow seed onto an existing lawn almost never works, and that is why.

What you'll need

• Yellow rattle seed
• Wildflower plug plants (optional)
• A scythe, strimmer or high-setting mower
• A rake
• A spade for turf stripping (optional)

Step by step

1. Pick the right area.Sunny, and ideally the poorest, thinnest, driest part of the garden — the strip over the old driveway, the bank, the bit that always browns off. Keep a mown path through or around it so it reads as deliberate rather than neglected.
2. Stop feeding and watering it, permanently.From now on this area gets nothing. Every kilo of nitrogen you add favours grass over flowers.
3. Reduce fertility if the soil is rich.The most effective method is stripping the turf and the top 50 to 75mm of topsoil off and sowing into the subsoil. It sounds drastic and it produces by far the best meadows. The alternative is years of cutting and removing to export nutrients slowly.
4. Sow yellow rattle in autumn.Yellow rattle is an annual that parasitises grass roots and reduces grass vigour substantially. It needs a cold winter period to germinate, so sow from late August to November, into turf scarified hard enough to expose soil, and it needs fresh seed — old rattle seed germinates poorly.
5. Get seed onto bare soil, not onto grass.Scarify or scalp so at least half the surface is bare earth. Meadow seed sown onto an intact sward germinates and then dies in the thatch.
6. Use plug plants for reliability.Sowing perennial meadow seed into existing grass is slow and unreliable. Plugs of knapweed, oxeye daisy, field scabious, birdsfoot trefoil and selfheal planted in autumn or spring establish far better and give you flowers in year one.
7. Choose native and locally appropriate species.Native species support far more insects than exotic annual mixes, and a cornfield annual mix — poppies, cornflowers, corn marigold — is a different thing entirely that needs bare soil disturbed every year to persist.
8. Cut once, in late summer, and take the cuttings off.The standard regime is a single cut in late July to August after the flowers have set and shed seed. Leave the cuttings on the ground for a few days so the seed drops, then rake every bit of it off. Leaving the hay in place returns the fertility you are trying to remove, which is the single most common mistake.
9. Add an autumn cut if growth is strong.On a still-fertile site a second cut in September or October, again with removal, keeps the grass in check while the meadow establishes.
10. Do not cut in spring or early summer.That is when the plants are flowering and setting seed, and when ground-nesting birds, caterpillars and small mammals are using the long grass. Cutting in June resets the whole thing.
11. Judge it in year three.Year one is mostly grass with some flowers. Year two is better. Year three is when a meadow started from a lawn actually looks like one. Give it that long before deciding it failed.

Tips

• Cut with the blade high — 50 to 75mm — and take it in stages if the growth is heavy. A strimmer or scythe copes far better than a rotary mower with a box.
• Leave a section uncut over winter each year, rotating which section, so overwintering insects have somewhere to be.
• A neat mown edge around a meadow changes how everybody reads it, including neighbours. It is the difference between 'meadow' and 'has stopped mowing'.

Common mistakes

• Scattering meadow seed onto an existing lawn — Seed needs soil contact and light. Sown onto intact turf almost none of it establishes, and the little that does is shaded out by fed, vigorous grass.
• Leaving the cuttings where they fall — The whole regime depends on exporting nutrients. Hay left to rot puts them straight back and the grass wins.
• Continuing to feed or water the area — Meadow flowers are adapted to poor soil. Fertility is the mechanism by which grass beats them.
• Sowing old yellow rattle seed — It loses viability fast and needs a winter chill. Fresh seed sown in autumn is the only version that reliably works.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask