There – see what I just did? That’s how easy it is to get rid of the weeds in your garden. Just call them wildflowers instead.
I am often struck by how often the ‘problems’ we face in day-to-day life are all in our heads. We spend money and time buying and looking after hardy geraniums – yet diligently weed out bucketfuls of herb robert. That’s another geranium, also very pretty with dainty little pink flowers and ravishing pink stems – yet designated, for no actual reason I can think of, as a weed.
So it is with the flowers that grow in our lawns. We’ve decided lawns must be grass: 100% grass, no other plants allowed, and certainly no flowers to interrupt all that smooth clipped green.
Well nature has decided otherwise – and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 30 years of gardening, it’s that you can’t buck nature. Let any lawn grow a little longer and you discover that under that perfect green sward are living a lot of other plants – and I mean a lot. They can wait for years, decades if necessary, for the chance to burst into life and flower: and the moment you let up on the mowing, as I hope we’re all doing this month for No Mow May, up they pop.
You have been conditioned by years of misguided gardening advice to view them as weeds: but they are wildflowers, with as much right to be there as any wild orchid, lady’s bedstraw or campion. They’re actually just as pretty, if you look at them with an unjaundiced eye. And best of all they do lots of good for your local pollinators and the condition of your soil. Here are my five favourites.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Greenery to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.