Making meadows in Sherborne.

I hope this doesn’t come across as me being too boastful. I’m so fortunate to have a garden beside the Brook that I treasure. In the last few years I have made much of it a wild flower meadow. It takes very little skill, nature will do just about all of it if you give it a chance by being deliberately idle. The image below is part of it, a few yards by a few yards. I won’t cut the grass until late August, and that’s about it. From being a tedious stretch of grass needing constant mowing, this year there are 50 maybe 60 naturally occurring orchids of two varieties. I’m so proud. I didn’t sow them, that just turned up.

Elsewhere, 3 years ago I shook a single sprig of the dried seeds of yellow rattle collected from Matt and Laura’s wonderful field and it’s now a delight, no more than 20 seeds. They have taken off and now I have my own meadow maker production centre. It knocks back the grass, and is allowing all sorts of other species to appear naturally. If you’d like a handful of yellow rattle seeds in a month or so, let me know.

I’m no botanist but this idle project could turn me into one.