6 tips for planting wildflowers

Wildflowers can be beautiful additions to your garden. Follow these easy steps to plant your own wildflowers and watch them bloom.

1. Prepare the site for planting by eliminating weeds and creeping grasses. You can pull or dig out weeds, but disturbing the soil often stimulates even more weeds by breaking the roots of perennial weeds, which can sprout new plants from the pieces. So, it is usually easiest to spot treat unwanted vegetation with an all-purpose contact herbicide like glyphosate. Leave tuft-forming grasses in place to help protect the soil from erosion. After the unwanted plants die, usually within three weeks, rake the open patches of ground and begin planting perennial and annual flowers, along with any additional small ornamental grasses that suit your scheme.
2. For fast results, start with purchased plants of colorful, flowering native perennials, such as coreopsis, gold- enrod, purple coneflower, and rudbeckia. These flowers can be started from seed, but the seedlings often take two years to reach blooming size. Meanwhile, they may be overtaken and lost in the exuberant growth of other plants in a wildflower meadow. By contrast, container-grown nursery plants of these and other hardy perennials often bloom the first summer after being set out in early spring.
3. Some gardeners prefer to stick with only native plants, but you will get much more colour, over a longer season, by inviting imported bulbs and annuals into your meadow. For early spring excitement, plant daffodils in large natural-looking drifts, and stud the edges of your meadow with smaller bulbs, such as crocus and grape hyacinth. The fading foliage of these and other springflowering bulbs will be hidden from view by perennials and annuals that appear later in the spring.
4. A few self-seeding annuals, notably cosmos, poppies, and larkspur, are often used as leading colour plants in a wildflower meadow. Although these annuals do shed seed by the millions, much of it is eaten by birds or carried away by rain. So, to make sure you have all the colour you desire, it is usually best to sow at least a few new packets seed each year. Experiment with other informal annuals that can be grown from seed, such as rose campion, but do not try to add hybrid annuals normally used for formal beds and borders, such as petunias and begonias, to a wildflower meadow. Their large, bold flowers often look out of place among the delicate wildflowers, and they rarely reseed with success.
5. If you know what plants you'd like to grow, you can customize your own wildflower seed mix. Stir all your seeds together with enough sand to fill a shaker with large holes, such as a grated-cheese shaker. Shake the mixture over bare, damp soil and wait for spectacular results.
6. Whenever you notice pretty wildflowers planted by the highway department along roadsides, find out what they are and order seeds from a mail order nursery for your own meadow. Many aren't native but they do provide plenty of colour.