Guy Adams - One Man Went to Mow: An Idiot's Guide to Meadow-making

Voices of the Countryside

Creating a wildflower meadow will put you in touch with nature and feed the soul. Here's how any old fool can do it...

At the bottom of my garden there’s a long wooden fence that, in my mind’s eye, performs a vaguely-similar function to the Berlin Wall of the late 1970s.

On one side, you find a small paddock grazed by half a dozen Jacob sheep. They belong to my parents, who live next door, and this particular area is the German Democratic Republic of our situation: it’s a world of order and conformity, where grass is the only plant tolerated, and any rogue wildflower that happens to pop up gets immediately chomped to pieces by our ruminant Stasi.

On the opposite side of the fence is a quarter of an acre of what used to also be part of this paddock, adjacent to the patio. Last summer, Mrs Adams and I asked a local garden designer, Kylie (hat-tip here), how we might make our outdoor space more presentable. She suggested fencing out the sheep from this parcel of land in an effort to create a “wildflower meadow.” And here we are.

In my increasingly-laboured Cold War simile, this little corner of my Welsh homestead is now the equivalent of Western Europe: a place where freedom, liberty and occasional decadence has become the order of the day.