Wild Flower Gardens

Wild flowers are gaining popularity rapidly, as cultivated plants for arranging or as a pocket of countryside within a garden. If you have only a tiny garden, you can grow wild flowers in containers on a patio, in the cracks in old walls, around a small pond or even in window-boxes. If you have more room, you could create a wild flower lawn or garden or dedicate a small corner especially for wildlife.

Growing Wild Flowers

For a wild flower hedgerow, sow or plant shade-loving species in informal clumps underneath the garden hedge. Suitable kinds include primrose, violet and wild daffodil. Larger plants such as cow parsley can be grown in a large clump in a hedge near the bottom of your garden, well away from the cultivated plot.

Create a wild landscape around a pond with moisture-loving wild flowers. Suitable types include lady's smock, reed-mace (bulrush), hemp agrimony, kingcups, comfrey, and rosebay willow herb. Cultivate any types of wild flower in containers filled with a suitable soil mixture. For good results, grow plants with the same needs in the same container – such as groups of woodland, meadow, or wall plants. Keep them moist or dry as required. You can even grow waterside plants in a pot if you use the kind without drainage holes in the base, and keep them well watered as the soil needs to be permanently moist.

Colonize old garden walls, outbuildings and dry stone walls with wild flowers such as valerian, ivy, houseleek, ivy-leaved toadflax, stonecrop and wall rue.

For a wild flower lawn, in spring or autumn sow a special mixture of grass seed and meadown flowers, or sprinkle suitable wild flower seeds onto an existing lawn. Suitable types include cowslip, ox eye daisy, toadflax, field scabious, speedwell, yarrow, heartsease, bird's foot trefoil. Mom the lawn once a year in late autumn after the seed has been shed.

A corner shaded by trees can be transformed into a wild retreat with foxgloves wild strawberries, bluebells, lords and ladies, and red campion.

Obtaining Wild Flowers

Don't collect seed or dig up plants from the countryside. Grow your own plants from seed. Packets of wild flower seed are available in garden centers, although a bigger selection is available at markets like Chakuchak Weekend Market in Bangkok. Some shops specializes in wild flower seeds and supplies individual varieties and special mixtures to suit different habitats. Most specialist seed shops list a good selection of wild flowers.

Buy plants. Some kinds, such as cowslip, are occasionally sold in pots at nurseries and garden centers. Some shops just outside Chakuchak Weekend Market sell seedlings and young plants; these are available as collections such as woodland, meadow, rockery, and moisture-loving plants. Some Thai native plants are now very scare in the wild but quite commonly cultivated as garden plants and sold by nurseries specializing in garden plants.