The area at home that is a wildflower meadow was 12 years ago an area of waste ground. It was originally where a threshing machine operated in the autumn, and had little soil, compacted, and full of docks and thistles.

It took a year of spraying weed killer every few weeks throughout a summer, to eventually clear the ground. A light rotovation tilled what little poor soil there was. But that was ok as wildflowers thrive in the poorest of soil.

I then seeded with a 60/40 mix of grasses and wildflower perennial seeds in the autumn. Spring the first year saw everything germinate, but in this first year the wildflowers do not flower, but put energy into a root system. From the second year onward they go from strength to strength and the show of flowers increases year on year.

There are probably about sixteen species of wildflower giving a broad mix of colour through the season. In early spring it is a carpet of yellow cowslips, a flower rarely seen now on grassland, followed by pinks of ragged robin and red campion, followed by whites of ox-eye daisy, orange of fox and cubs, and yellow buttercups. The season moves on to the mauves of geraniums and mallow, finishing in the autumn with the purples of greater and lesser knapweed.

In summer the meadow hums with bees, churrs with grasshoppers, and is a banquet of insects, which the birds frequent when feeding chicks.