As a garden designer and soft landscaper, I’ve put together my fair share of beautiful borders, planting countless spring bulbs, small pots and bareroot roses. But recently my imagination has been set alight by a completely new way of creating riotously colourful beds of herbaceous plants, with a planting style and process known as a seeded perennial meadow (SPM).
You may have seen SPMs used to amazing effect by Professors James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, created for the 2012 London Olympics. Since then, SPMs have started popping up in botanical gardens, such as Oxford and RHS Garden Wisley, and large charity-held estates, including Chatsworth House.
What is an SPM?
An SPM is, in short, an area of dense planting that returns every year, composed of herbaceous perennials and grasses, grown predominantly from seed sown directly on to a prepared substrate.
SPMs are markedly different from our UK native meadows. Most keen gardeners will be familiar with grass-dominant native UK meadows and can recognise wildflowers like knapweed, ragged robin and (sometimes) rare wild orchids. We mark the seasons with their arrival in May, and their mowing at the end of the summer.
SPMs are designed to stay standing for the whole
