The flower bed nearest the car park has always been given over to native UK wildflowers. When we started out, we sowed the whole bed with cornfield annuals – poppies, cornflowers and oxeye daisies – and it looked stunning for a few weeks in June and July.
However, there weren’t many flowers at all for the rest of the year, and ten years ago people weren’t so tolerant of leaving untidy areas for wildlife – and it certainly looked untidy. We cut down most of the stems before Remembrance Day so that it didn’t look so untidy, but that’s just the opposite of what insects need.
The other problem was that although we knew that cornflower annuals grow best in disturbed soil, they’re even fussier than that – they like newly-disturbed soil. We tried several ways of achieving this, but the display got more and more sparse as the years went on.
So we started adding in perennials – first we added low-growing ones like white clover and black medick, to be an understory that didn’t look untidy, but did provide cover for insects. We added a few perennial native flowers, starting with Devil’s Foot scabious, small scabious and kidney vetch; that meant there was something in flower for many more months of the year.
Gradually we’ve begun to leave most stems and leaves, and over the last few years we’ve noticed when chatting to passers-by, that most people accept this level of untidiness. We do cut the path edges as neatly as we possibly can just before Remembrance Day, and we dress many of the beds with leaf mould, so these more formal aspects will distract from any residual untidiness in the wildflower bed.
We’ve had a lot of people commenting on how nice it is to be able to see so many of the UK’s wild flowers in one place. The pollinators certainly appreciate it – the place is humming on warm days, even in 2024 when there was a very noticeable drop in the number of insects generally. And surveys of the gardens have shown a large increase in the number of different species using the plants. The ecosystem is developing more and more every year.
We’re often asked if this bed is an example of rewilding – it’ll be apparent from the description above that it certainly isn’t, it’s a very artificial product of a lot of trial and error and deliberate sowing and planting. But we hope everyone agrees that it looks great, and the insects certainly love it.
But we’re still working on getting poppies to grow there.
There are 29 different species of bee-friendly plant in the wildflower bed:
- Birdsfoot trefoil
- Corn cockle
- Cornflower
- Cowslip
- Creeping buttercup
- Devil’s Bit Scabious
- Field poppy
- Forget-me-not (mainly honey bees rather than bumble bees)
- Foxgloves
- Geranium sanguineum
- Germander speedwell
- Hawkbit
- Knapweed
- Meadow Cranesbill
- Primrose
- Red deadnettle
- Ribwort plantain
- Wild carrot
- White clover
- Sheep’s sorrel
- Self-heal
- Small scabious
- Speedwell
- Spurge
- Water avens (Geum rivale)
- Wild marjoram
- Wild wallflower
- Wood avens (Herb Bennet)
- Yarrow
[whciih]
- And a further nine in the other beds here:
- Dandelion
- Echium vulgare
- Hedge Woundwort
- Kidney vetch
- Lamb’s tail plantain
- Musk mallow
- Teasel
- White deadnettle
- Wild thyme