Wild at Heart

Perennial wildflower meadows, studded with spring bulbs, are a contemporary gardening staple. They are ecologically sound, self-sustaining and relatively low maintenance. What could be more 21st-century? Yet their provenance, as Christopher Lloyd discusses in his 2004 book Meadows, dates back to the Middle Ages – and even further if you look to the paradise gardens of sixth-century Persia. Wordsworth’s lonely wanderings aside, in the 19th century it was horticultural iconoclast William Robinson who was most instrumental in reviving this practice. “Ten years ago,” he writes in The English Flower Garden (1883), “I planted many thousands of narcissi in the grass, never doubting that I should succeed with them, but not expecting I should succeed nearly so well…”

Christopher Lloyd’s mother – a true Robinson acolyte (‘ was my mother’s bible and and dog’s tooth violets cast adrift among the buttercups and clover of the Horse Pond meadow. Or shy wood anemones hunkered down beneath the lilacs of the Hollow.