Rattle and Roll

One of the challenges in encouraging a wildflower meadow is that the grass can choke the flowers. One of the interesting ways to mitigate this is to encourage or even sow “yellow rattle”. In itself it’s a pretty enough annual yellow flower, self seeding easily so it doesn’t take long to infiltrate your meadow. But additionally the yellow rattle is parasitic on grass roots, knocking it back and in effect allowing other wildflowers to establish.

Why “rattle”? Turn up the volume, play the video and you shall find out.