Turning lawn into meadow

[whatsagoodusername]

We have a very small front garden, with a small lawn and border hedges. We are terrible gardeners and don't go into the lawn except to grudgingly pull weeds once or twice a year or mow once or twice a summer. It looks pretty awful.

I keep thinking about turning it into a meadow with perennial wildflowers in the hope that it's good for wildlife and pretty instead of just two-foot high grass that we haven't bothered to mow. The garden is already reasonably healthy for a completely neglected space - everything grows abundantly, there are insects and the occasional slow worm.

How realistic is this? Is this going to be a reasonably low-maintenance project once it gets going? I don't mind some work now to get it established, but I know we won't spend ages maintaining in the future. If it will require a lot of ongoing work, we're probably better off leaving it as.

it really depends on if the site is the right conditions for a meadow. Poor soils, sunny etc. it’s harder to establish than you think. You need to get rid of existing grass and re-sow.

It’s not going to be any different to what you have now. Why don’t you just put down landscape fabric and gravel?

Yo can do it gradually by just planting the odd flower that you like eg cowslips, cornflowers and just letting the rest grow. It doesn’t have be be flowers to benefit the environment- plenty of insects will live in long grass.

Perhaps because this would be the exact opposite of a wildflower meadow.

Would it not look really drab when not in bloom over winter? Like scrubland?

We had a wildflower section in garden once and it looked amazing… the first year. The second year it was overcome when big old weeds and thorns and all sorts and looked like the entrance to Sleeping Beauty’s castle with not a single lovely wild flower in sight.

Hi - we did this with our lawn -- in our ignorance (no gardening interest or skill!) we dug up little patches and put in wildflower mix.

It's turned out great -- lots of butterflies, bees, flowers popped up, more birds visiting too. It's been lovely.

Friends who are keen gardeners have advised us to cut it back in October so it can grow up again next year.

We're now reading this to be better prepared next year.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/lawns/creating-wildflower-meadows

Good luck with it!

Why not remove the lawn and grow camomile and have a camomile lawn?

A wildlife meadow has to be dug over once a year and is labour intensive.

Unrealistic. The "wildflower meadows" you see in photos need a lot of expertise and planning to work, with input at specific times and in specific ways. If it was just a question of neglecting a lawn you'd see them everywhere.

A lawn is pretty much the lowest level of maintenance you can get unless you pave it over.

Cornflowers won’t persist in a lawn. As their name suggests, they’re a weed of cornfields, they like bare ground to germinate.

A planting of annuals like cornflowers, poppies, corn marigolds has to be dug over. But that isn’t actually a meadow despite being popularly called such. A meadow is grass with perennial wild flowers.

As others have said, a meadow is bloody hard work. I have one and spend a lot of time cultivating.

Our front lawn was drab and ruined by having skips on it during building work so what we did was put bulbs in. Over 200 in fact. We then seeded over the top. The bulbs are a mix and flower from February to September so you might have daffodils or hyacinths or alliums or different poppies at various times. We seeded with a range of ornamental grasses mixed into the generic lawn seed. The effect is lovely. We let the grasses grow a little bit and the bulbs grow between them. It's like a meadow effect, perennial and just needs a strim. I love it.

As some others have said, wildflower meadows are not low maintenance and if you sow one, it will probably look fabulous year 1 but after that the grasses, thistles, and other things you don’t want will take over.

Sounds like the wildflower meadow is best left as a dream then! Thank you, everyone!

Maybe I'll chuck some seeds at it and see if anything pops up 🌸 then mow it all down when it's scraggly. We've already got some tulips that the squirrels planted that sometimes come up through the grass.

Never tried it myself but I suspect a real meadow needs grazing to maintain it. Perhaps OP could get a couple of sheep?

I've bought some of this and used it to seed in gaps in the lawn. I'm hoping that gradually it'll bring more variety and be better for insects. The grass looks shit anyway so it won't be worse
https://wildflowerlawnsandmeadows.com/product/wild-flower-lawn-seed-mix/

We planted wildflowers after our garden was destroyed by skips during our building work. The 1st year it looked amazing but the 2nd year it looked like shit.
The mix I used had loads of oxeye daisies that totally took over and nothing else would grow.
Over the next few months I’m planning on digging it up and planting bulbs instead and then sewing a clover lawn.

To start with plant some yellow rattle. It helps with getting rid of the grass and makes room for the wildflowers to grow. You probably could do with scraping the topsoil layer off too.

As in topsoil is too fertile.

A real meadow is grown for hay. So as I said above, grazed in winter and early spring, then shut up for the grass to grow, cut for hay once the grass is flowering, then grazed again once the grass has recovered from the hay cut.

If it’s being grazed through the summer it’s a pasture. Can still have a good show of wildflowers if the grazing pressure is light. Easier with cattle, which graze indiscriminately, than with sheep, who pick out the nice bits. That’s one reason a lot of the “rewilding” projects are using cattle rather than sheep.