How to Grow Wildflower Gardens
- artfulgardensnz
- Sep 17
- 4 min read
Early spring is a great time to sow your wildflower seeds.
DISCLOSURE: I think the gardens that are the most work are wildflower gardens. As the wildflower seeds come up, so to do the weeds and it can be very fiddly weeding.
However I have found some ways to have success with wildflowers and I keep sowing them because they are just so colourful and whimsical, they flower perpetually throughout the summer and autumn. Wildflower gardens provide a wonderful habitat and pollen for bugs. They also thrive in ‘poor’ soil provided you can keep the seeds moist as they germinate and establish.
Preparation
Prepare the soil for sowing wildflowers by removing all weeds. Lightly rough up the surface of soil with a rake or a hoe. Wildflowers like bare, fine soil. I would wait a week to allow any weeds you didn't properly remove to come away again and then spray or pour boiling water on them. Starting with a weed free garden gives your wildflower seed the best chance to take off.
Another option, is to also spread newspaper over your soil, cover this with a thin layer of compost (4cm) and sow your seeds into the compost.
Next you sow your seeds
To get an even distribution of seeds. Make a seed mix by combining 1 part seed to 20 parts hubris, like sand, seed raising mix or sieved potting mix.
Sprinkle this mix over your soil and rake it in gently. Then (as long as the soil is dry enough to not stick to your shoes) you can walk all over the newly seeded area to compress the seeds into the ground so that they do not ‘run’ away when you water your soil.
To stop anything disrupting my seeds as they germinate, I cover the area. As you see here I use some plant trays to do this, it is not pretty but it works. You could also use fine netting and spread it over your seeded area but you might need to raise it off the ground so that the seedlings do not grow through and get tugged out of the soil when you remove the cloth.
Watering
As wildflower seeds are fine and lie close to the surface, only water by spraying a fine mist until your seedlings have germinated. Otherwise they will be displaced by big drops of water.
Keep soil moist for 10 days
Watering in dry periods will encourage more flowers, water the soil not the plants. Water in the morning before it gets too sunny.
As your seedlings grow, try to weed as you see any recognisable weeds appear. Until you get to know the wildflowers you are growing it can be hard to distinguish whether it is a weed or not and it is not till it flowers that you might realise it is a bonafide wildflower.
It probably pays to remember that wildflower gardens are on the messier side of the garden style spectrum so let it do its thing and provide a habitat for the local insects.
Once your flowers have finished flowering, they will have seedheads drying out on their branches. I snip off the seed heads each year and put them into a big brown paper bag to dry out. Then I rub the seedheads between my fingers to break away any seed pods and release the seeds into the bag. I leave them to dry in these bags until I sow them the next year or give them away.
Once everything is finished in the autumn you can mow down your wildflower plants with a lawn mower or weedwacker (if you have a large wildflower meadow), or pull each plant by hand as it stops serving its purpose. You will have seeds from these plants now in the soil that will grow the next year if you want to repeat the process.
To keep the area tidy in the meantime you could lay a thin layer of tree mulch on the soil, if it is thin enough to break down a bit over the winter the wildflower seeds may grow through the mulch or you could sprinkle seeds and soil over top of the mulch next spring.
A Wildflower Alternative
I took this picture at Mona Vale in Christchurch a few years ago and to me this garden has some of the whimsy and colour of a wildflower garden but is more structured and would be easier to maintain. Instead of sowing seeds, you would plant seedlings and bulbs close together, and maybe mulch the exposed soil to feed the plants, retain water and suppress weeds.
Planting this way means you can have more consistency, not have any bare patches and you can select what plants you want to have where.
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