When is a meadow not a meadow?

Not a meadow

Does it matter what we call things?

This was the question posed by Miles King, well-respected Conservation Director of the Grasslands Trust – an increasingly vociferous and effective pressure group, campaigning to reverse the destruction of the nation's grasslands and meadows.

Now, that's ancient, traditional meadows, I should clarify – what Miles King capitalises as Wildflower Meadows.

What with 2012's RHS Britain in Bloom going 'wild about wildflowers' (that's arable cornfield flowers, not meadows), and the Olympics planting Fields of Gold (that's annual seed mixes, not meadows) and the advent of MeadowMats (that's wildflowers used as shed roofing: does that count?) and the people who manage Hyde Park letting the grass grow long to encourage wildflowers (ah - now we're getting there, surely?): there has never been a time when meadows have been more in the public eye, yet more annoyingly woolly in definition to the purist.

This isn't one either: the Fields of Gold
at the Olympic Park

In his blog, Miles takes particular issue with the highly successful Pictorial Meadows: annual seed mixes invented by Professor Nigel Dunnett, urban horticulture specialist, RHS Chelsea Flower Show regular and urban renewal pioneer, of the University of Sheffield's Department of Landscape.

Pictorial meadows are transforming urban spaces cheaply and effectively: they are introducing many people who have never had much to do with nature, or the countryside, to the joys of getting up close with beauty, and teeming insect life, and the pleasures of feeling things growing under your feet.

I've planted them in my own garden: they are breathtakingly beautiful, full of wildlife, and one of the best things I've ever done. I should add – just for balance – that I'm currently also taking care of 1/3 acre of rare traditional chalk downland meadow, the top third of my garden, and that's beautiful, full of wildlife and one of the best things I've ever done, too.

Read the post for Miles's full argument, but it basically boils down to the fact that by calling themselves meadows at all, Pictorial Meadows are distracting people's attention from ancient traditional meadows – of which there are precious few left - confusing the issue, and therefore undermining Miles's attempts to save our traditional grasslands. To quote: 'pictorial meadows are not contributing to the conservation of Wildflower Meadows or their wildlife (and other values). And for that reason it does matter what we call things.'

I happen to know, from regular conversations with him over the past few years, that Nigel is someone who thinks particularly deeply about our wider environment and the role plants have to play.

So when a Twitter discussion erupted last week – mainly in support of Miles's position – I couldn't help thinking Nigel's voice was missing from the debate. I was curious to know his take on the subject, so I got in touch and asked him. I felt his answer deserves quoting at length.

So what about this? MeadowMat growing at the nursery

He told me a story from the very early days, when he was just beginning to work with annual seed mixtures. Gloucester Council asked him to vegetate a central reservation on a dual carriageway: roadworks and tree planting had ripped up existing grass and shrubs, and all that was left was 'mown grass and tired landscape shrubs'.

Nigel made them an annual mix which flowered from June to November, a blaze of yellow and orange through into the autumn.

“I was contacted by a representative from English Nature,” he says. “She said this should never have been done.

“Her issue was that by making it look so easy to make these 'wildflower landscapes', we were giving the go-ahead to farmers to destroy meadows in the countryside because they would think that they could be made again in cities. And because these weren't proper wildflower meadows, that was a very bad thing.”

Nigel asked her whether she would have preferred the central reservation to remain mown grass and variegated shrubs: to which her answer was 'yes'.

'I was staggered by this,' says Nigel,' because this was a nature conservationist saying that she would rather have areas offering very little wildlife value, and extremely monotonous in a visual sense, instead of these flower, nectar and pollen-rich landscapes.

'By implication, her purist approach would both deny people a beautiful experience, and also eliminate a potential wildlife haven. People like this are dangerous in my opinion.'

This is: wildflowers in the south west
(courtesy of the RSPB via www.oursouthwest.com)

He points out that research has shown that far from non-natives having little wildlife value, the opposite is true. He says the general consensus now is that diverse flowering meadows and gardens are highly valuable to invertebrates, regardless of where the plants come from.

'What I am doing is working, and it is highly successful,' he says. 'It is bringing flower-rich landscapes into the heart of the city, into the everyday landscape. This isn't the nature reserve approach, where people are kept away from valuable sites and only those in the know can visit them, or make the choice to travel to them.

'What we are doing is making meadows in places where people have no choice but to walk through them, live with them, look out on to them. And therefore they do have to have a different character.'

His final point struck a particular chord for me: I dislike the entirely unnecessary polarisation of gardener and nature conservationist almost as much as I do the whole gardener vs designer dichotomy. Though it may be in a different key, we're all, surely, marching to the same tune.

'People like to see things in such simple black and white terms – things are either one thing or the other: it's either a meadow or it isn't.

'To me, life isn't so simple. Things are in shades of grey. So there is a whole continuum of meadow types, ranging from flower-rich and annual, through to grassy, perennial and with little flower.

'The key thing to me is that the pictorial meadow type approach, whether annual or perennial, opens the doors, or the floodgates to the much wider use of the native wildflower meadow because it makes meadow landscapes far more acceptable and part of the norm, and enables them to be used in high profile, high intensity places that would formerly be preserved for intensive horticulture.

“The use of the word meadow is deliberate. People can identify with it, and it makes sense. Of course it isn't a meadow in the purest sense, but then the same applies for countless other things that I can think of that are popular and well-liked.

'I would suggest the argument in [Miles King's] blog is entirely misplaced and focussed on the wrong thing. Rather than attacking a concept that is really entirely positive and is bringing huge benefits for urban biodiversity compared with what was there before, I suggest that the real fire should be on the rural landscape and the covering of thousands and thousands of hectares with monocultural crops with minimal habitat value.

“Compared to this, the concern over the naming of a few tens of hectares of flower-rich landscapes is rather trivial.”

**stop press** Miles King's response to this post is included among the comments below

Gardening trends for 2012

Far be it for me to set myself up as a gardening soothsayer: about all you can say about the coming year with any sort of certainty, let's face it, is that the weather will be occasionally surprising and not at all 'normal', someone somewhere will be killing a slug, and Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen will be at Press Day at Chelsea.

But since I'm not one to shy away from sticking my head above the parapet, quite frequently getting it rapped sharply by assorted arrows in the process, I thought I'd make a few predictions.

Fresh from the Garden Press Event last week, in which all things new in the world of horticulture were dangled enticingly before the garden press to distract them away from their coffee and the fencing (and I don't mean the garden variety: it's a long story) in order to convince them that this - yes, this - is the next Big Thing.

Of course only a few will fulfil such promise, and part of the fun is trying to spot which those might be. Here are the top trends I think we'll be hearing more of over the next year.

Gardening gone digital: The power of the web is being harnessed in ever-more-sophisticated ways: definitely a trend on the up.

Garden design tools, for example, are moving steadily from the clunky to the cool: Plantify is the new kid on the block with its new online design tool launching at the end of March.

It's the latest in a long line of increasingly good online design tools accessible to ordinary gardeners, yet offering a satisfyingly high standard of graphics and at the same time being properly useful. A personal favourite is the ever-wonderful GrowVeg.com, which helps me work out what I'm growing in my veg patch each year.

There's one innovation Plantify has which raises it above the mildly irritating and increasingly old-fashioned offering from the BBC (not enough plants, not enough detail, not enough anything, really) and the product-centred Garden Visualiser from Marshalls.

And that's the frankly inspirational idea that you can use Google Earth to produce a to-scale outline of your garden. I have been, I'll confess, terrified to the point of paralysis about trying to measure my former quarry with its near-vertical banks and countryside-wonky edges. But Plantify did it within minutes (including the position of a couple of established trees).

There's more: the intention is that once you've decided what you want to plant, it'll be automatically costed using current nursery price lists, and then if you want to go ahead and buy, however many nurseries your purchases are scattered across, Plantify gathers them all in one place and delivers the plants to your front door. Now - if it works - that's impressive: and surely a sign of things to come.

The return of 'new' old veg varieties: Eat your heart out, heritage varieties and exotica: nostalgia veg are the next big thing. Spotted on my rounds (and in some cases, snapped up for growing chez moi): samphire, asparagus pea, and Scorzonera 'Duplex'.

All vegetables grown hundreds of years ago (or in the case of samphire, gathered from the seashores as a delicacy to use with fish): and now, after a spell in the doldrums, being rediscovered. Others to return to favour lately include cardoons, seakale, strawberry spinach, and salsify.

Renewables-powered gardening: there are wind-powered and solar-powered garden lighting systems already on the market. Solar also powers fountains (if somewhat erratically, I'm told, from those who have them); and an innovative company in Cambridge has even invented a greenhouse with solar glass which generates enough power to heat itself and to spare.

And now there's solar-powered irrigation, here to solve that ages-old problem of lugging watering cans back and forth when you don't have any mains water available. The only potential drawback I can see with Irrigatia's new system is that you'd have to keep your water butt topped up somehow: but as long as you can get around that, your allotment watering is sorted.

Meadows: I am stewing up a little bloglette on the wider subject of meadows, so I'll restrict myself to saying that this a Jolly Interesting Subject which I suspect may well be one of the debating topics of the gardening year this year.

So more of this later: but I just wanted to point out that you can now buy meadows on a mat. Discuss.

Peat-free innovations: Spurred on by the government's impending (though voluntary) phase-out of peat in gardening composts by 2020, peat producers are - at last - expanding their range of peat-free growing media.

It's long been a bugbear of mine that I can't get hold of a good peat-free seed compost. I am very nearly entirely peat-free, and have pretty much always been (one of the few areas in which I turned out to be an early adopter - but I won't bore you with all that). But the very nearly comes in because I use John Innes seed compost, which is soil-based but also peat-based.

That's mainly because I haven't been able to find anything better. I've been thinking about sieving my New Horizon but can't quite bring myself to risk a trial sowing.

Now I discover Sinclair's, who extract vast amounts of peat but are also in a Jekyll and Hyde sort of way the country's leading producer of peat-free and manufacture New Horizon, do a peat-free sowing compost.

I had a long conversation with the nice lady on their stand and even she admitted that it's in its early stages; knowing how long it took them to get peat-free reliably right, I suspect we may have a little way to go before it's threatening my consumption of John Innes.

But I plan to hunt some down (it's not available in any of my local garden centres - another area where there might be some room for improvement): perhaps I'll even be brave and do some trialling with some sacrificial seedlings. I will be reporting back.

The hammock is dead. Long live the swing seat: not exactly new, but more of a growing trend emerging from the last few years and showing no signs of going away.

The swoon-inducingly gorgeous hanging seats designed by Stephen Myburgh have led the way in what amounts to the usurping of the hammock by nest-like cocoons hanging from free-standing frames (or occasionally from the ceiling or a handy - though presumably sturdy - pergola).

There's now a cheaper and more hammock-like version too; the Cacoon, inspired by and I think made out of sails. Even John Lewis have 'pod chairs', for goodness' sake. Roll over, hammocks: your days are done.

A meadowy miracle

Apologies in advance: I am about to brag, crow, boast and generally be smug and immodest about a bit of my garden. In my defence, I don't actually take any credit for this as it's happened pretty much entirely without my input: as all the nicest things that happen in my garden seem to do.

A few months ago I posted, with much shame, a picture of the duff bit of my garden - also known as the 'middle bit', the 'difficult area', or in moments of particular gloom, the 'dump'. Just to remind you, this is what it looked like for most of last year. Actually, if I'm honest, for several years before that, too.


Shortly after a weekend's work in spring, it looked tidier, but frankly, still not what you might call inspiring.

Ah - but just look at it now.


It's even better close up.


This has been going on since about the beginning of June, and it just keeps getting better. First we had these little vetchy sort of things, spangling the whole area with tiny pea-like flowers in fetching shades of mauve, purple and pink. Then just as I thought those were coming to an end, out popped the cornflowers, followed by poppies, marigolds, and oh, tons of things I can't even identify.


I had heard some pretty good things about the annual seed mixes from Pictorial Meadows - but I had no idea it would be quite this good.


The amazing thing is that it took me all of half an hour to sow, and since then there's been pretty much no maintenance, not even much weeding (I've tugged out half-a-dozen fat hen plants but they're the only weeds that got a look-in). I did have to water it every day for a week or two as we hit that patch of dry weather in spring just after I'd sown it - but since they came up properly I haven't been watering at all, and they're still looking this good after nearly six weeks of no rain.

My problem area has now been promoted to Best Area of the Garden Bar None and I take all visitors to see it before I even give them a cup of tea. I've never had a bit of my garden I actually wanted to show off before.

My only regret is that I shall have to leave it behind when we move and so will miss the loveliness of the seedheads in winter. But never mind: the beauty of annuals is that it all happens all over again next year, and I now know that no matter where we end up, there will be a corner of our garden I shall sow with an annual meadow like this.

Making meadows while the sun shines

I mentioned a little while ago in one of my endless posts about the on-going saga of the house move that I was stewing up a plan to tart up the neglected central section of my garden with a metaphorical coat of paint in the shape of some annual meadow flower seeds from Pictorial Meadows.

Just to reiterate what a state it was in throughout most of last year, here's the horror pic again:

I think I referred to the planting of a meadow as 'a quick fix'. What I had forgotten was that when you decide you're going to perk up the living room with a quick coat of matt emulsion, and then you get out the gear and start to actually do it, you find that first of all, the corners of the wallpaper need sticking down where they've started curling up... then that dent needs filling... and that bit where the kids threw a trainset at the wall and took a chunk out will need repapering altogether, which means I'll probably end up having to do the whole wall... and in the end you've got a huge job on your hands.

So it is with the creation of meadows from scrap land.

On the first occasion when it looked as if it would stay dry for more than six hours - which, it being March, was quite a while later - I sprayed the lot with glyphosate (I am what's generally known as pragmatically organic - i.e. I'll avoid chemicals wherever possible but when it's absolutely necessary, such as clearing weedy ground, I reach for the weedkiller).

And two weeks later the above weedy mess was reduced to this:


Still not pretty, but at least you could imagine you might be able to make something of it now. Good thing too, as by now my little 50g packet of seeds was on my windowsill and calling to me seductively every morning.

Right, I thought, I'll just hoe up the dead topgrowth and then I can rent a rotavator and have a fun day playing with power tools.

Unfortunately, some of the dead topgrowth proved less than willing to move. So I stuck in a fork to see what was going on. And this is what I found.


Seven year's worth of couch grass had not been so much as mildly inconvenienced by my single application of glyphosate: though the topgrowth had gone, the roots were hale and hearty and doing a passable impression of spaghetti.

By now I'd run out of time to allow more topgrowth to come through so I could apply a second round of weedkiller: and I'd learned my lesson from a certain TV gardener who has never quite lived down his decision to rotavate an allotment containing couch grass roots (which, I understand, he has now sensibly abandoned so someone else can dig them out properly). So - with a wistful glance in the general direction of the hire shop - I'm getting behind my trusty digging fork and painstakingly, painfully doing it all by hand.

Two hour-long sessions later - it's 15ft x 30ft, so we're not talking small patch here - and here's what it's looking like:


Nearly there. Hopefully I shall be able to bring you some prettier pictures soon. And next time I start wittering on about how easy something's going to be, bop me over the head or something until I start talking sense again.