How to change your Lawn into a Wildflower Meadow

Mar 13, 2022

Have you considered changing your lawn into a wildflower meadow?

Once established the wildflower area will be a great attraction to bees and butterflies and other pollinating insects as well as easier to maintain than a traditional lawn.

For success with a wildflower meadow it is important to consider the following:

When a lawn is sown it is generally at about 40 grams to the square metre.
A meadow is sown at about 4 grams, which is 10% of the above rate. Meadow mixtures are a mixture of grass and wildflowers and space needs to be left for the wildflowers to establish.
Often in lawn mixtures there is a species called amenity perennial ryegrass. This species is an excellent lawn grass but it's generally too competitive for wildflowers.

To succeed at creating a wildflower meadow, you therefore have to remove or weaken a considerable amount of the existing grass. This can be done in several ways.

Clear the ground

This is usually the most successful route. You can either dig the ground over, kill off the existing sward or use a turf cutter to remove the turf.

The aim is to get back to a clean seedbed. Then sow with an appropriate Wildflower Meadow Seed Mix in the spring or in autumn. Sow a mixture of largely perennials with a few annuals in it. Then you will get a colourful show in the first year from the annuals and the perennials in the mix will come back year after year from year 2 onwards.

Clear part of the ground

With this approach you would clear the bulk of the grass but not necessarily clear it all. You should aim for at least 50% bare soil. Then rake the ground and either:

Sow a 100% wildflower seed mixture that's appropriate for your soil.
Introduce Wildflower Plugs that again match your conditions.

Plugs will cost considerably more than seeds but give you a better chance of success in existing grass.

Yellow rattle seed

Yellow rattle is a semi-parasitic plant and grows on the roots of grasses as its host plant thereby weakening the grass. Yellow rattle seed should be sown in the autumn. The winter period breaks the dormancy, and it germinates in the spring.

So, for example, you could cut the lawn back in the autumn and scarify the ground. Sow some yellow rattle seed at 0.5 grams to the square metre. When you can see that it's taken, the following autumn sow some pure wildflower seed as highlighted before.

Clearly this option takes longer to produce a wildflower area.