Wild Flower Garden

Have you ever wanted a wild flower garden? A wild flower garden is not simply a garden that has gone wild, in fact it is quite the reverse. A garden that has gone wild normally looks a bit of a mess, whereas a wild flower has to have a tightly regulated environment.

Garden flowers have been toughened, so to speak. They have been cultivated and cross-bred so that they can put up with not being taken care of all that well by the average gardener who does not know much about gardening, although there are some very fragile garden plants too. However, wild flowers have never had this treatment, they grow only where the circumstances are right or they do not grow at all. It is practically impossible to grow wild flowers where they would not naturally occur.

This is why many people's attempts at creating a wild flower garden flop so miserably - they have expected the wild flowers to 'just grow wild' without having crafted the right environment. Therefore, if you want to produce a wild flower garden, you will first have to decide what sort of flowers you want to grow.

Do you want meadow flowers, woodland flowers, hedgerow flowers, marsh or riverside flowers? You can combine some of these styles, of course. You could mix meadow and hedgerow varieties, if you plant a hedge border around your garden.

After you have decided on which varieties of flowers you would like to or can grow, you have to set about manufacturing the correct environment. One of the prettiest wild flower gardens, if your climate is right, is an orchid garden. In Thailand, many of the orchids grow on the bark of live or fallen trees, so we have a few uprooted tree stumps in shaded areas of the garden with dozens of wild orchids growing on them.

The easiest wild flower garden for most people to create would be waterside, meadow and hedgerow combined. Therefore, first you will have to make a suitable pond and begin growing wild hedges around your perimeters. Then plant a coarse grass on the rest of the soil. The pond can have a brick border, but at least one edge should be muddy - just wet mud leading into a shallow edge of the water.

When these micro environments are ready, but not before, you can go out and forage for plants from similar environments to transplant into your wild flower garden. One note of caution here: please check that the flowers that you want to collect are not protected before you uproot them and never strip an area of a variety. If there are only one or two plants of a type, do not take them.

Remember that your wild flowers are not that resilient, so you should have prepared their new home before you went collecting and you must replant them as soon as you get home. Try not to leave it until the following day.

It is best to collect flowers just after they have flowered and are commencing to die back. When you have discovered a flower that you want, carefully dig it up with a trowel and include a good sized slab of soil with its roots. You can put this into a plastic bag and place this in a basket. It is a good idea to take few photos of the flower in its original environment, so that you can do a bit of tweaking when you get home. It will also help you remember what that flower likes to live with when you go out collecting for your wild flower garden next time.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is at present concerned with exterior wall lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.