My garden just got wild

This year was my third attempt to start a wildflower garden.

My back garden is mostly lawn and slabs, but all the way at the back is an awkward section behind a trampoline and a set of swings, which gets weedy and overgrown. What if we could fill it with beautiful flowers and make some insects happy? And impress our neighbors at the same time?

A couple of springs ago I bought a packet of seeds, sprinkled them around and crossed my fingers. A wildflower garden is supposed to be wild, right? So making any more effort than this would be against the spirit of it. I had to let nature do its thing.

Nature did its thing, which was long grass and a lot of dandelions. None of my seeds made it. I suppose it thrived, in its way, but it wasn’t the buzzing haven of biodiversity I had hoped for. Bees were indifferent. Neighbors likewise.

The same thing happened the following year.

This year I got serious and did some research. Cut the lawn short in the autumn, said Google. Keep the grass and weeds at bay for long enough for the flowers to make a start in the spring.

But even after mowing and covering the ground with a sheet for a while, the grass was surprisingly vigorous. So I ended up turning over most of the soil with a spade, pulling out endless roots and burying the grass face down. In other words, killing stuff and releasing carbon. By the end of the process I had a beautifully bare wildflower-garden-to-be, as well as some interesting blisters on my hands, and a completely new opinion of Marie Antoinette, from all the history podcasts I had time to listen to. For this destruction not to have been in vain, I had to reach my goal of a more biodiverse garden.

For what seemed like months, nothing sprouted.

Then it did. For what seemed like months, nothing flowered.

Then it did. In June I went away for a week and returned to a rainbow of color. Reds, oranges, purples, and a single proud sunflower. Stepping closer, I saw that the whole patch was alive with bees and other insects.

But the real measure of success came when I spotted something we hadn’t expected. Down in the shade of the tall flowers, rootling around like it was nothing special, an actual hedgehog. 

Wild.