Wilding

It caused Dr Bones great amusement to discover that I had dug over an area of the garden with the aim of planting a wildflower patch: wasn't cultivating wildflowers a contradiction in terms? In fact it isn't as simple as just leaving an area of ground to its own devices and seeing what happens. If it's in a damp, dark area where grass finds the going tough, you will indeed get wildflowers, but they will be all Green Alkanet and Herb Robert, and they grow anywhere. If it's in an open, light area, all you will get are rough grasses, and if bramble and ivy are anywhere close at hand they will start making an appearance after a while, too. You do actually need to work at it. 

I'd already left this particular bit of the garden to run wild in the expectation that it would magically turn into a meadow hung in the summer with bees and butterflies, and it very much did not. Instead it got the grasses, the ivy and the brambles, and the merry pollinating insects had nothing to do there. My other efforts came to nothing, too: in one bed I planted a 'Bee Mat' impregnated with all sorts of lovely seeds and not a single one emerged. 

But this new wildflower experiment I did properly, digging over the ground, removing the remains of the old turf packed with coarse grasses, and leaving it for several weeks to see what weeds came up before planting out the seeds. The packet said the 'nurse grasses' would start emerging in 7-to-10 days, and when nothing much happened I was rather despairing. But, after a gap of five weeks or so, here are the first bold little shoots poking above the soil. At least I hope they are the grasses I want, rather than the ones that were there already, which I don't!