Wildflower meadow

Value to bees

Nectar

Very high

Pollen

Very high

As a honey crop

Major honey crop — yields a surplus in good years

Which bees, and why

Supports the widest range of bees of anything you can establish, precisely because it offers many different flower shapes. Specialist solitary bees that need one particular plant are the ones that benefit most, and they are the ones in steepest decline.

The diversity is the accessibility. A meadow contains flowers for short tongues and long tongues, for large bees and for bees three millimetres long.

Worth knowing

The highest combined forage value of anything in this catalogue, because of diversity and duration rather than any single plant's output.

Flowering

In flower

April to September (northern hemisphere)

The whole point is succession. A well-composed meadow has something in flower continuously for five or six months, which no single species achieves.

When nectar flows

Varies through the season as different species come and go. Good meadows carry a substantial nectar resource from May to September.

Year-to-year variation

Composition drifts year to year with weather and management, which is a feature rather than a defect — it is what keeps different bee species supported in different years.

What it does to the honey

Produces wildflower honey, whose character shifts through the season and from place to place — the honest expression of a landscape rather than of a plant.

Growing it

Conditions

Full sun and — counter-intuitively — poor infertile soil. Fertility is the enemy: rich ground grows vigorous grasses that outcompete the flowers.

Size

30 cm to 1.5 m depending on the mix and the soil.

Native range

Temperate grassland worldwide; the species involved are region-specific.

Suits

Meadow or wildflower area, Large gardens, Small gardens, Farm scale

Maintenance, and the bit that matters

The cutting regime is the whole management. Cut too early and nothing sets seed; cut too late and grasses take over; leave the cuttings and fertility rises. Once a year, after seeding, with the arisings removed.

• Reduce fertility first. Strip the turf and topsoil if you can, and never add compost or fertiliser. This is the step most often skipped and the commonest reason meadows fail.
• Sow yellow rattle. It is a hemiparasite on grass roots, weakens the grasses and opens space for flowers — the single most useful species in a new meadow.
• Cut once in late summer after flowering and seeding, then remove the cuttings. Leaving them in place returns nutrients to the soil and undoes the work.
• Use a regionally appropriate native mix. Imported wildflower seed of the wrong provenance supports the local bee fauna far less well than it appears to.
• A small patch works. Even a few square metres of unmown grass with clover and self-heal is a real contribution.

What it looks like

Grasses interwoven with flowering herbs — knapweed, bird's-foot trefoil, oxeye daisy, red clover, vetches, yellow rattle, scabious, self-heal — with different species dominant through the season.