Poppies and cornflowers are quite the prettiest of weeds. This year, I decided to jazz up my vegetable patch using a packet of wildflower seeds from The Balcony Gardener. I followed the normal steps for creating a meadow, and sowed the seeds in rows between my autumn-planted onion sets, and amongst my carrot seeds. Now [...]

…these fabulous seed grenades from Suck UK. Filled with wildflower seeds and soil, these grenades will help any would-be guerilla gardeners jazz up dull and neglected spots of land. And they look fabulous. Subscribe to F&F email updates

I have adored every single episode so far in Alys Fowler’s The Edible Garden. It has just the sort of happy, floating-about-in-the-garden feeling that I really love, and as well as making me very happy, it has inspired me with some quirky recipes and ideas. One of the recipes that caught my eye in the [...]

Believe it or not, this wildflower meadow is slap-bang in the centre of Southampton. It seems the council have seeded it in a rather dull bed of ornamental grasses. This new municipal planting seems to be growing in popularity: last year we found a meadow blooming in Broadmead, Bristol. It is such a refreshing sight: [...]

Isn’t cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) just marvellous? In May the roadsides become frothy and playful, and rather fun, until a goon clutching a strimmer butchers these gorgeous white umbellifers. Cow parsley, or Queen Anne’s Lace, if you’re introducing it to someone important, is a terribly savvy wildflower. Where strong agricultural fertilisers killed off many meadow [...]

Nothing is quite so cheering about the English spring as the Primrose, Primula vulgaris. And nothing is quite so depressing as the sight of bright yellow, pink and red cultivars bringing ‘spring colour’ to miserable-looking beds. These gaudy flowers are the wrong colour for spring: wrong in fact, for any season. Please don’t grow them. [...]

Walking through central Bristol’s Bearpit is not usually a particularly aesthetically pleasing experience. But now a beautiful meadow has appeared next to the greying walls and rubbish lying around. It’s a pleasant splash of colour amongst the concrete jungle of Broadmead. If you want to create your own meadow, you have got two options really. [...]