Making a wildflower area for bees

Why scattering seed fails

The commonest approach — buying a wildflower mix and scattering it on existing grass — almost always fails, and for a specific reason. Grass in a fertile lawn outcompetes wildflower seedlings comprehensively. The seed germinates, the grass shades it out, and by the second summer there is nothing left but grass and a few annual poppies.

Establishing a meadow is therefore a matter of reducing fertility and weakening the grass first. Everything else follows from that.

The method that works

1. 1Reduce fertilityStop feeding. Remove all cuttings rather than leaving them to rot back in. This takes several years and is unavoidable.
2. 2Sow yellow rattleIn autumn, onto closely mown and scarified turf. It is hemiparasitic on grass roots and reduces grass vigour by up to half, opening space for everything else.
3. 3Cut and removeCut in late July or August after the flowers have set seed, leave the cuttings a few days to drop seed, then remove them entirely.
4. 4Add plug plantsSowing seed into established grass rarely works. Plug plants of knapweed, oxeye daisy, bird's-foot trefoil and scabious establish far more reliably.
5. 5Cut pathsMow paths through it. It looks intentional rather than neglected, which matters more than it should.
6. 6WaitThree to five years to a genuine meadow. There is no shortcut.

What to include

The nesting half

A meadow that is all flowers and no bare ground supports foraging and not reproduction. Leave a south-facing bank, a path edge or a scrape of bare soil unvegetated and undisturbed. Around seventy per cent of bee species nest in the ground, and in a meadow they will be nesting at the edges rather than in the sward.

Leave tussocky grass uncut in places too. Several carder bumblebees nest at the surface in tussocks, and a mower is the commonest cause of their nests failing.

Managing expectations

A first-year meadow looks like an annual bedding display, because that is what the poppies and cornflowers in most mixes are. A third-year meadow looks like grass with flowers in it. A fifth-year meadow on reduced fertility looks like what people mean by a meadow. Anyone unwilling to accept the middle years should plant a border instead, which is a perfectly good thing to do.