Top Tips for Growing Wildflower Plants

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Wildflower plants, like the Bird’s Foot Trefoil (Lotus tenuis) here, can grow as well in domestic gardens as in the wild: they look and smell beautiful and require minimum fuss and attention.

Allow your wildflower plants to become established with a little space and water. They then thrive while you sit back and admire.

Many wildflower plants need poor soil. Rich compost and other artificial nutrients often harm them.

To stop the spread of any plant, including ones like the Field Scabious Knautia arvensis (mauve-blue flower below), simply chop off their heads after flowering and before the seeds start to drop.

If you like fabulous surprises, however, leave well alone. Native wildflower plants are pretty clever at planting themselves in unexpected nooks and crannies…and you can always share unwanted babies with neighbours!

On that very subject, only ever give or receive plants when you are 100% certain of their identity. The invasion of harmful, non native plants such as Japanese Knotweed and Rhododendren could well have started from the best of intentions.

Get it right, though, and imagine these splendid Great Mullein Verbascum thapsus (yellow flower below), for example, growing in each garden in your road… what a fantastic corridor or chain for the bees, butterfies and other insects.

Similarly, when planting more than one of any native wildflower plant, always group them together. Insects then have ready access to an easy feast!

In the wild, it’s ‘survival of the fittest’. Native wildflower plants are used to snuggling up nice and close, being overcrowded and fighting for the elements they need. Again, several of the same wildflower are happiest planted near to each other rather than in splendid isolation.

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Space at a premium? A single Devil’s Bit Scabious Succisia pratensis or Betony Betonica officinalis (see ‘A Sample’ page) can look as lovely in a patio pot or cultivated border as in a designated wildflower patch.

Creating a ‘wildflower-patch-in-a-patio-pot’ can be very successful, for example,with Wild Chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile). One customer said her plan was to plant 2 chamomile, one each in a small, terracotta pot. On warm evenings now after work, she sits, glass of wine in hand and feet relaxing on an aromatic mini chamomile lawn!

Just remember, whether you are planting one kind or a mixture, containers are an unnatural setting for native wildflower plants. Poor as possible soil and regular watering in dry weather are key.

Common sense to many: after any gardening/outdoor activity, wash all hands, younger and older. And always be certain of identity and suitability of a plant before consuming any of its parts.