Creating a perennial wildflower meadow workshop
Excited about our day courses coming up, teaching workshops on how to create a perennial wildflower meadow like the ones we have here at Common Farm Flowers, I nipped out today to collect a little ripening cowslip seed for our students to sow when they come in June.
Cowslips have a delicious, soft scent, like bergamot, or Earl Grey tea, and are one of my absolute favourite wildflowers, blooming early in the year and reminding me of the orchard of my French exchange's grandmother, who had a walled garden in the Loire, filled with apple trees, from one of which hung a swing, to reach which, in April, one had to walk, kneedeep, through a mass of cowslips.
We've lost 90% of our wildflower meadows in the UK since the second world war. If all my wildflower meadow students take home a tray of freshly sown fresh cowslip seed from their day here, they'll have lovely strong seedlings to plant out in the autumn, and the beginnings of their own carpet of cowslips flowering in their wild patches early in the spring next year.