Gardeners have a fraught relationship with wild plants and weeds, but there is a growing movement to appreciate the charms and biodiversity benefits of these native plants and early colonisers. To offer a fresh perspective, we’ve elevated typical uninvited garden guests to be the stars of exquisite cut-flower displays, inspired by art and bound to change your mind.
I’ve amassed quite a collection of old wooden drawers over the years. I use some as salad containers and others as mini cabinets or plant theatres to showcase cherished pots or vases of flowers around the garden (a potager blend of herbaceous intermingled with vegetables and wildflowers). Our lawn is a thick mossy sward, dotted with an array of ‘weeds’ before it transcends into meadow – all buzzing with insect life. An immaculate lawn can set flower borders off beautifully, but as we experience falling insect numbers, it makes sense to allow part of the lawn to return to a flowery mead. In Britain, we are becoming more familiar with No Mow May and leaving areas of the sward to grow longer, providing more habitats and food for struggling wildlife. Allowing wildflowers to colonise the sward has many environmental benefits: the sponge-like ability of moss and a more diverse root structure to improve drainage will help the lawn cope with flash flooding, and stay greener during hot weather and periods of drought, if not cut too short.
Arranging weeds with yellow rattle, clovers and daisies
Creating an arrangement in an upturned wooden tray, drawer or wine box focuses attention on the display even more. For this arrangement, I used a collection of old, glass, medicine bottles with a bluey-green tint and lined them up – in true recycling style – in an upturned, ceramic lid of a toilet cistern, which fitted snugly into the base of the wooden drawer. Moss from my garden was tucked around the bottles to give extra stability and disguise the edge of the lid.
I wanted to showcase a collection of lawn ‘weeds’, but some are so tiny that I included a few more ornamental versions of the wilder flowers, such as the darker foliage form of Trifolium repens and the longer, more cultivated daisy heads of Mexican fleabane. I was keen to include a stem or two of yellow rattle, a semi-parasitic stalwart of meadows, alongside some of the more common lawn interlopers.
Plants used
Bellis perennis – common daisy
Erigeron karvinskianus – Mexican fleabane
Galium aparine – goosegrass
Geranium robertianum –herb Robert
Glechoma hederacea –ground ivy
Hypochaeris radicata – cat’s ear or false dandelion
Prunella vulgaris – selfheal
Rhinanthus minor – yellow rattle
Trifolium pratense – red clover
Trifolium repens – white clover
Trifolium repens ‘Purpurascens Quadrifolium’ – black-leaved four-leaved clover
Veronica persica – Persian speedwell