A month ago, in the heat of the blazing sun, I was sowing a wild flower meadow in my clients’ new orchard which is on a slight slope.We hadn’t had rain for weeks and the seed needed to be kept damp to germinate. With the hose pipe ban looming, I felt comforted that we could get through the tricky first few weeks until germination with the underground rain water harvesting system that they had installed. That was until we realised that we had used up the last drops of rain water filling up the new pond in the late winter, laying new paving and watering in the newly planted areas! A slight gasp of panic … but we still had over a week or so until the hosepipe ban, so we used the mains water and my client informed me she was very good at doing rain dances!
Well they certainly worked – torrential rain for a whole weekend – the sort that is so heavy it washed away some of the seed to the bottom of the slope! Next phone call from my client – ‘Some French partridges have taken a liking to my garden and are feasting on the seed – they are ever so pretty!’
‘Well’, I mulled to myself, ‘I suppose the purpose of the wild flower orchard garden design was to attract wildlife into the garden!’