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Wildflower Turfgrass

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Wildflower Turfgrass is grown using a selected blend of native wildflowers and grass species, thus recreating the habitat of a wildflower meadow. All gardens, from a rural to an urban setting can be of benefit from a wildflower meadow within its scheme. Using wildflower turfgrass within the environs of your garden can help attract insects and invertebrates, such as butterflies, bees, spiders and millipedes. Attracting such wildlife within your outdoor space will your garden to function as an eco-system within its own right.

Wildflower meadows are an ideal candidate within low maintenance schemes as they need only ONE annual cut during the Autumn period. This maintenance regime compares favourably to say, a normal lawned area, where mowing is required once every ten days approx during the growing season. Furthermore, wildflower turfgrass can be used in collaboration within a normal lawned area, to create beds and borders, the flowers creating the seasonal pallet of colours and structure normal found within an ‘standard’ herbaceous planting area. Using wildflower grass to create planting areas such as beds and borders, within a scheme, also helps reduce weed ingress, and hence, lower maintenance activities such as weeding, during the summer months as compared to using traditional planting methods for beds and borders. Wild flower meadows can be integrated successfully within a variety of garden styles, from cottage garden schemes to post modernist designs. Indeed, the ‘organic’ nature of a post modernist garden design is particularly well suited to the integration of a wildflower glade within its environs.

Although wildflower meadows are most suited to assymetric, or informal design studies, its format within a garden may also be a symetrical or formal nature. Therefore, wildflower meadows have a place in many garden styles and should not be stereo-typed to one particular genre as is a common mistake.

Wildflower turfgrass is also an ideal candidate for consideration for proposed ‘problem sites’, where, for example poor soil structure and low fertility may rule out laying to traditional lawn or planting. Futhermore, wildflower turfgrass is readily adaptable to extreme topographical or physical characteristics of the site (i.e steep slopes), which again may rule out normal vegetative cover, purely on the basis of growing success and the maintenance practicalities involved for the homeowner.

Further to its use within a poor soil medium, various species within the wildflower mix such as red clover and birds foot trefoil actually have nitrogen fixing characteristics, thus acting as a sort of growing fertilizer for all the surrounding plants and thus helping to improve such impoverished soils.

Wildflower turfgrass may also be installed on ‘green roof’ systems, being tolerant of water run off, various pitch angles etc, that may be encountered on such installations. Another characteristic making wildflower turfgrass particularly condusive to green roofs is its soil-less specification, making it lighter in weight than traditional turfs and thus reducing the overall supported weight of any such roofing system. Furthermore the dense vegetative cover of the turfgrass helps give it good insulating properties, needed for such builds.

A typical wildflower/grass seed blend will normally comprise 20% wildflowers to 80% grasses. While a 20:80 mix is fine there is always the danger of the monocots or grasses, literally, ‘swamping’ the dicots or flowering plants. This trait can be particularly common on more fertile, well drained soils. To combat this, we supply a wildflower turf which actually has a 50:50 wildflower/grass seed mix ratio, giving the dicots or flowering plants every chance to help extend the range of its dominion within environment. To further reduce the surrounding grass species out-competing the wildflowers various semi parasitic plants are introduced to help stave of over exhuberant grass growth smothering the wildflowers.
The plants in flower within the turfgrass will vary from the spring through to the summer according to the different species of flowers in the turf. The emergence of new flowers and the types of plants that flower will vary from year to the next according to temperature, moisture and available nutrients. This will ensure that no two years are the same (as is the case with true wild flower meadows) and gives a constantly changing environment for the homeowner and wildlife alike.

Once established the Wildflower turf requires very little maintenance activity, however, there is one important task to carry out each autumn; to cut the plants and remove these cuttings from the site

This can be done by strimming if on very steep slopes and raking or using a mower and collecting the cuttings, say in a woodland glade setting . Make sure these tools are sharp and try to minimize trafficking. Cutting the plants back to 2 to 3 inches (50 to 75 mm) in length is a vital part of their lifecycle and ensures that re-growth will continue year on year.

An open sward over the winterperiod helps ensure a healthy and disease free plant habitat which can benefit from what meagre light is available to them during the onset of winter. As the spring approaches and the soil temperature raises, the wildflowers and grasses are in perfect condidtion to capitalize on the improve climate conditions to develop flowers and seed heads quickly to repeat their perennial cycle thus ensuring a wildflower meadow year upon year.

Wildflower Turf Specifications

Common Name Latin Name
Wildflower content
Autumn Hawkbit Leontodon autumnalis
Betony Stachys officinalis
Birdsfoot Trefoil Lotus corniculatus
Bladder Campion Silene vulgaris
Cat’s Ear Hypochoeris radicata
Common Knapweed Centaurea nigra
Common Sorrel Rumex acetosa
Common Toadflax Linaria vulgaris
Common Vetch Vicia sativa
Cowslip Primula veris
Field Scabious Knautia arvensis
Lady’s Bedstraw Galium verum
Meadow Buttercup Ranunculus acris
Meadow Cranes-bill Geranium pratense
Meadowsweet Filipendula vulgaris
Musk Mallow Malva moschata
Ox-eye Daisy Leucanthemum vulgare
Ragged Robin Lychnis flos-cuculi
Red Campion Silene dioica
Ribwort Plantain Plantago lanceolata
Rough Hawkbit Leotodon hispidus
Salad Burnet Sanguisorba minor
Self-heal Prunella vulgaris
Perforate St Johns Wort Hypericum perforatum
Tufted Vetch Vicia cracca
White Campion Silene latifolia
Wild Carrot Daucus carota
Wild Marjoram Origanum vulgare
Wild Red Clover Trifolium pratense
Yarrow Milfoil Achillea millefolium
Grasses
Sheeps Fescue Festuca ovina
Crested Dogs Tail Cynosurus cristatus
50% wildflower 50% grass by weight.

Wildflower seed proportions by volume

All watermarked photos courtesy of Wildflower Turf Ltd