Wild flower verge

[GrapeVinery]

I'd like to create a wild flower verge on one side of the drive but not sure how to go about it.

Currently it's a grass verge that has quite a few perennial weeds such as dandelions and a few cow parsley plus the usual annual weeds. There are also lots of snowdrops and daffs which have now died back.

If I want to create a wildflower verge to replace the grass & weeds, do I need to clear the existing weeds and grass first? I can weed the perennials easily enough but how should I remove the grass if I need to? Would I need to lift the turf and put some top soil down or could I cover the verge now in weed fabric to clear the ground before sowing wild flowers next spring?

I have plenty of ox-eye daisies elsewhere in the garden that I'd like to use and then add other wildflowers like red champion.

*campion

You can sow yellow rattle seeds to weaken the grass and then add wildflower seeds. Might take a couple of years though...

It's extremely difficult. I spent years and a fortune, not to mention incredible hard physical work,to turn an area at the bottom of our garden, around fruit trees into a small wildflower area. You have to remove ALL the grass...in the end,we hired a turf cutter. I tried seed, hopeless, wild flower plugs,both annual and perennial,they cost me £1 each about 8 years ago. They we bought wildflower turf. The grass still takes over every year.we tried yellow rattle which parasitic to grass seed and plants for Many years, not one came up. We get far more pollinators from the normal plants. A lot of the perennial wild flowers are extremely difficult to eradicate,those daisies tall and short variety are absolutely everywhere. No to top soil, they need rubbish stoney low nutrient soil. We are now in the process of turning these area back into "garden" . They looked nice for a couple of years, when we had a lot of Flanders poppies,and pretty awful when cut back at the end of the year,and this is pretty much hidden at the bottom of the garden.

By “a couple of years” @Bramshott is tactfully saying 5-10 to see a real difference 😂 We’re on year 6.

As @Nannyfannybanny says, it’s a big project for an existing garden because the soil is too rich.

Grass out-competes everything except the really tough weeds (dock, dandelions, cinquefoil etc) so the pretty wildflower verge of our imaginings isn’t an easy task.

Covering the ground to starve weeds and grass of light for a full season will help, but the tricky part is impoverishing the soil so wildflowers thrive and grass doesn’t.

You have to remove the topsoil which is a big expensive (mechanised) or slow and back breaking (by hand) job. And it will look really great for two months of the year and a mess for the rest. Why not just add in the wild flowering plants you like (say, moon daisies, which are tough and will hold their own in grass) into the grassy area that you have? Or even better for the environment, add in a tiny pond there which supports loads of wildlife and plant a couple of trees on that side?

Thanks for all the replies. It's right at the end of the drive so I want it to look like a grass verge as if it was next to a road. We already have a pond and loads of hedges and established trees with plans to add more in the rest of the garden. Because of the location I suspect it's never been tended to by previous owner other than planing the bulbs and the odd mow.

I think I'll weed out the dandelions and other weeds and transplant the ox eye daisies and some clover and see how it develops next year. Hopefully I can mow or strim once daffs have died down and before the grass takes hold next spring.

You haven't said how big the area is. Our front garden,south facing,has rubbish dry stoney shallow soil,we have now planted it up prairie style
It took around 6 years to establish the wildflower area, yes it was backbreaking and expensive.i forgot, after the wildflower turf, which the grass quickly took over,we bought wildflower border turf,100% flower,no grass, the grass still takes over. It's on a plastic mesh roll out mat, which we are now having to try and dig up. As others have said,it will look pretty a couple of months of the year. The rest of the time,it will look pretty awful, like a lot of council run verges, with cutbacks in services. I planted daffs in the normal lawn, they take months to die back, cutting the grass around them, they look so messy.

Aren’t dandelions and cow parsley wild flowers? Just reads oddly to me that you want to take out ‘weeds’ to replace them with ‘wild flowers’!
Could you clear a long thin strip and seed it with e.g. cornflowers, poppies, ox-eye daisies this September. Like a long thin flower bed. You might get some self-seeding the following year among the grass but you’d probably have to repeat. It wouldn’t look totally naturalistic but you’d get some flowers in early summer.

Our lovely neighbour has a cracking patch which he lovingly tends every spring and sows with seed.

Another friend has more true wildflower patch. He put rattle in, and plugs of other things yearly and then lets it do its thing.

It's not a multicoloured haze of flowers. But it had lots of lovely flowering clovers, burnet, oxeye daisies (which are fine but can become very dominant) and it's gorgeous and full of wildlife.

Often the best wildlife patches aren't the super colourful ones, but the ones filled with locally appropriate, native plants. Might not be so pretty, but the bugs, hedgehogs and birds will appreciate it.

Grass is well adapted to making good use of hi nutrient levels, so you will want to reduce the nutrient levels. A simple quick way is to skim the turf off, but I wouldn’t do it in your case because of the snowdrops and daffodils.

So in your case, I would simply mow from mid August onwards, making sure you remove the cuttings. It’s more important to remove the grass while it’s still growing than it is to let the flowers seed - most meadow plants, ie plants that grow in meadows, are perennials.

You can try yellow rattle if the verge is sunny, it doesn’t like shade. Make sure the seed is pressed into the soil. It’s semi-parasitic on grass.

Be aware that most “wildflower meadows” aren’t meadows, they’re an assemblage of cornflower weeds, annuals that need bare soil.

For planting into an established sward, it’s better to go with plants. Primroses and cowslips for spring, later, things like black knapweed, the various vetches, meadow vetchling, yarrow, meadow cranesbill. And I would hang on to your cows parsley, at least till other things are established.

It's really a small patch. Border is max 1 metre deep and approx 3 metres long.

Appreciate dandelions and cow parsley are 'wild flowers growing where I don't want them too' but they are rampant and the seeds blow into the neighbours' gardens and establish so easily. Neighbours all around us have neatly manicured gardens and we are trying to tame ours after moving in last year. Previous owner had a gardener who kept on top of it all. Quite happy to have them in other areas of the garden but prefer to remove them from this patch and replace with something else which will make a pretty entrance to the drive.

Lots more tips and suggestions thank you. I will now grass this autumn and start transplanting some wild flowers from elsewhere in the garden.

*to

That's disappointing about wildflower turf but also really useful because I have been thinking about getting some.

I did this to my front lawn. The positives are that it's colourful and beautiful in its own slight derranged way.The bees love it . It also stood up incredibly well to the drought.

The negatives are that it does look eccentric at best probably more accurately scruffy. Grass comes back and back.

I won't say what i did because I wouldn't do it again. I will cut right back in autumn and try yellow rattle then grow some cowslips etc to put in next year.

I don't think I'd go back to lawn as I find it fairly ugly and pointless but I can't say that what we have is what I wanted at all.

I would follow @MereDintofPandiculation 's advice and put in fairly large plants. I would go for shorter plants to avoid the mad Boris haircut of a patch we currently have.

Scruffiness is improved by neat edges, or mown paths through. Seen a lovely picture in the Garden (RHS magazine) of someone who has mown a labyrinth into their “no mow May” lawn.

You can bring the mow forward to mid July, which is the cut off date under Environmental Stewardship Schemes. Has the advantage that none of the grass will have flopped, will mean cutting off some of the flowerheads.

The older your house, the more likely it is that your lawn will be a well mowed field rather than a sown or laid lawn of a restricted number of carefully chosen grasses. I’ve got Cocksfoot, Yorkshire Fog, False Oat, Crested Dogstail, Bent, Perennial Ryegrass, Sweet Vernal Grass and Foxtail, which just about matches the fields around us.

Beautiful names! How did you ID all your grasses?
Also, does that mean optimally for normal lawns (we do just no mow May) that we should be leaving it uncut until Mid July for the best environmental support?

All the grasses have different flowers. Foxtail has soft sausages early in the year (Timothy isn’t so soft and flowers later). Bent has incredibly delicate “Christmas trees” of flowers. Yorkshire Fog is similar but less delicate. Crested dogs tail has one sided spikes. And so on. Also, you look at the leaves and the little flaps where the leaf joins the stem. Sweet grass looks as if it has nasal hairs where the leaf joins. Yorkshire Fog has pink stripy pyjamas at the base of the stem, and very soft leaves. Crested hair grass you can recognise by thrusting your hand into a clump - all the little hooks along the leaf edges grab at you.

Yes, optimally leave to mid July or a bit later. No mow May was just to get people started, to get the idea that grass didn’t have to be half an inch long and devoid of flowers to be beautiful. If you leave it longer, all the grasses will flower, and they are lovely in their own right. You may also attract different butterflies, when I started growing mine we added Meadow Brown, Ringlet and Speckled Wood.

My ecologist friend has just cut his wildflower/wild lawn patch this week.