Mid-summer Progress Report

We are now in our second full year of letting what was once a scrappy lawn have the freedom to just grow while we wait to see what’s there and what has arrived. Mid June is a good half-way stage in the process of creating a “mead” and to pause and record what is happening.

As expected, the early stages through spring were dominated by mostly blue flowers – one of the nicest being the flowers of the “weed” known as creeping charley; flowers that are attractive to and which feed early bumble bees etc. As the grasses have grown taller those plants have been visually replaced by the foliage of various umbelliferae and by the four species of clovers that we have – white, red, pink and sweet-white. Dominant colours now being whites and yellows as the pictures below show.

We keep some narrow paths mown so that we can access the further corners of the garden, but otherwise this is very low maintenance lawn-care. We have also been moving in plugs and seedlings of native flowers such Echinacea and Rudbeckia. These will flower in late summer and early autumn and, left to stand, will offer seeds to birds in the beginning phases of the winter to come. Asters and golden rod are growing as well and will also flower later.

Of, course, this style of gardening is attractive to some and anathema to those who like monoculture short grass but we enjoy the bosky atmosphere it produces and it most certainly is proving to be popular to the suburban wildlife.

There will be another update in a couple of months when the late summer flowers are showing at their best.

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