Wild flower Inspiration

 We have a traditional cottage garden, here in our two hundred year old house - reasonably tidy, with lots of flowers, but never ever 'manicured' to within an inch of its life. We have birds and bees and butterflies galore. Frogs too. 

This year. I decided that I wanted to plant a (very) mini wild flower meadow in an underused and somewhat neglected flower bed at the bottom of the garden. Now, it's flowering, and I'm truly stunned by how beautiful it is. In fact it seems to come straight out of one of my own novels - the Amber Heart - in which Danilo, dozing in a meadow on a fine summer's day, is woken by Marianna, singing and gathering flowers as she goes. 

'He rolled over and, peering between grass stems, he saw Marianna, wandering towards him, singing to herself as she walked, her arms full of meadow flowers. She wore a dress of pale muslin and, still clutching the flowers against her breast with one hand, she took off her bonnet with the other. Then, holding bonnet and flowers together, she pulled the pins out of her hair, throwing them away with a gesture that was at once angry and abandoned. Having escaped from her confinement, however briefly, she seemed determined to be free in every possible way. He watched her hair tumble down her back in a shining brown cascade. She shook it out, lifting her face to the sun. 

Dizzy with sudden desire, he crouched low, but when he saw that she was coming his way, he didn't know what to do, so he turned over and feigned sleep hoping that she wouldn't see him. Instead, she almost tripped over him and a cascade of blue cornflowers, yellow cockle and crimson poppies, already wilting from the warmth of her hands, fell on his upturned face.'

This is a key scene in the novel, one which is repeated later, as you'll discover if you read it. Today, looking at my wildflowers in full summer bloom, I was back in the world of the book.

Here's Chat GPTs excellent evocation of Danilo and Marianna in the meadow - although as usual with AI, you have to be very specific about what you want. And of course, the characters still exist in my mind. I've lived with them for years. All the same, it read my mind pretty well!

I first saw wild flower beds like this on the grass verges as we drove into Dundee, many years ago, and then again at Culzean. Our local council still have a few, but they must be skimping on seed, or buying cheap mixes, because their wild flower beds are nothing like mine! 

Back in the spring, I bought a mix of native British seeds from a good nursery, and followed the instructions to prepare the soil and scatter them randomly. Then I waited. We had a very rainy late spring, followed by a very warm and sunny early summer, which seems to have done them a lot of good, because they germinated almost immediately, and here they are.

I'm told that when they die back in the autumn, I should cut them down to five or six centimetres, and leave the cuttings so that the seeds scatter themselves again. Don't feed, don't weed, just leave them alone for the winter, although I may try sowing some extra seeds to fill in any gaps through the autumn and again in the spring. However it turns out next year, I'm delighted with the results.