Wild flowers.
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Bonjour.
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Very true Marmite, we love walking the lanes in Spring. Fortunately and wisely, they do not cut the verges here until the end of Spring, just as the Oxeye daisies are going to seed. Sadly, newly emerging butterflies including the meadow browns seem to pay the price.
7th May 2024 at 4:41 pm #598848We have a 2m wildlife strip around most of our garden. It is strimmed early in the spring before any wild flowers appear and again in the autumn after they have set seed. In between that we let the wild flowers appear as they will and just pull out any troublesome brambles or wild willows. We have planted a few rhodos, camelias and hydrangeas to bulk up the boundary and give some wind protection. When we arrived there was a small patch of bluebells. Husband cuts the lowers as they seed, puts them upside down in a bucket so all the seeds fall into the bottom. The seeds are then broadcast in the wildlife strip. In this way we have created about 50m of bluebells much faster than nature would have done it.
W tried to get some shasta daisies to grow by sowing seed but it didn’t work so I now grow them in seed trays, prick them out into modules and plant them as plug plants which works really well.
I have bluebells but they’re not the native ones, they are the large intrusive ones, so I have to keep digging them out from where they start crushing the plants in my flower beds and transplanting them into the wild bit. I don’t tell my neighbour I do that as she is adamant they should be discarded because they are the nuisance variety. She says the same about the wild violets that keep springing up everywhere. Is she right?
9th May 2024 at 9:17 am #598941Spanish bluebells are a nuisance when they invade areas of native English bluebells in the wild. I like the wild sweet violets in our wildlife strip where they are really pretty but not in my borders where they are a nightmare to dig out when they are all mixed up with my plants. It’s a case of striking a balance, one mans weed is someone else’s wildflower .
Yes, it’s the Spanish bluebells that keep appearing everywhere in this garden BM, I have to dig really deeply to get them out too and because they’re appearing in amongst my shrubs it’s difficult to get them out without upsetting the shrubs! The same with the wild violets.
On a happy note, when inspecting my ‘wild’ strip, I can see the start of seedlings emerging! I’m excited!
Among the trees again. Lovely oxeye daisies and early spotted orchid.
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I am pleased to report that I have a huge foxglove and gigantic burdock plant growing in my wild patch, so some of the wild seeds I’ve sown in the past obviously did germinate!
As usual I can’t post photos as taken on my phone and too big.
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This beauty has appeared in our garden and I’m certainly no expert, but my computer tells me the following.
Verbascum thapsus, the great mullein, greater mullein or common mullein, is a species of mullein native to Europe, northern Africa, and Asia, and introduced in the Americas and Australia. It is a hairy biennial plant that can grow to 2 m tall or more. Its small, yellow flowers are densely grouped on a tall stem, which grows from a large rosette of leaves.
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