Flora not so Locale

When we started off selling wildflower seed there was a voluntary trade body called Flora Locale. It laid down very sensible rules for the production and storage of wildflower seed. Unfortunately, it folded a while ago and nothing has replaced it.

Customers are now largely in the dark about where the seed they buy is from and how it has been produced. Worse than that, they can't even be sure whether the wildflower seed they buy is actually wildflower seed. We know who the good guys are, but from the outside it's impossible to tell. Our advice is to always ask. 

In fairness to our competitors, there's a lot of pressure from customers to supply something which will give quick and colourful results, rather than something which is ecologically appropriate and sustainable. It's not uncommon either to find sellers showing pictures of a bunch of weird annuals in flower supposedly illustrating a cheap grass heavy meadow mix.

Let's be clear; a "wildflower meadow" mix to us consists of appropriate perennial wildflower species with grasses. You can add a few cornfield annuals to give some colour in the first year if you like - feel free! 

I'd say there are four different types of "wildflower" and wildflower meadow mixes currently sold in the UK:

• Constructed
• Harvested from an existing meadow site
• Grasses and not really wildflowers
• Wildflowers? Grasses? You're having a laugh

What We Sell

...mixes which include only genuine native species, with seed often sourced in the UK. They come in two types.

Constructed mixes have a wildflower element typically harvested from blocks of the same plant, grown for the production of seed. If the mix includes grasses, to produce a traditional wildflower meadow mix, the grasses will be "certified". That is to say, they won't be native wild grasses, but true to type. There's very little commercial production of wild grasses in the UK.

A mix like this will typically - and rather randomly - be 80% grasses, 20% wildflowers. You can find them with as low as 5% wildflowers, which will mean they're cheap as chips, but a mix with a ratio like this are a false economy. It will almost certainly just produce lots of grass. For a while now we've been selling our versions of this kind of thing with 30% wildflowers, which is more likely to give a decent result.

These mixes should give you certainty over what you're getting. They're relatively limited, but do provide a starting point for establishing different plant communities, selected for different soil types and situations. Because they're predetermined, they're beloved of landscape architects and other specifiers. They're usually available in large volumes, as the wildflower element consists of relatively common species. I'm always slightly nervous about the supply chain that can be involved in this kind of mix though, which makes it difficult to reliably trace seed if something goes wrong.

There are also seed mixes which have been harvested from donor sites and cleaned up. We're big fans. In the past they're only really been used for local schemes, and haven't really been available commercially. They're generally only available in smaller quantities (up to say 250kg), and usually not harvested annually. This means you can be reasonably confident ahead of time as to their content, but it will vary over the years according to management, weather etc.. Even if they're relatively well cleaned, they will also include more chaff. 

 

Why bother with them? They include native grasses. You can be sure about their very local provenance and freshness. Assuming the harvester knows what they're doing there won't be any problems with contamination, which sometimes afflicts seed in constructed mixes. They have (sometimes amazingly!) high floral content and diversity, as they're usually harvested from complex and well established sites. Some have as much as 70% wildflowers to only 30% grasses. We sell mixes for under £100/kg inc. VAT and carriage which would cost three times as much if they were put together manually.   

By the way, because Biodiversity Net Gain schemes are measured on outputs rather than inputs, these mixes are perfect for them. There will be more becoming available too, as landowners harvest seed from new meadows. 

The Not Very Relevant

There are a lot of mixes available from larger seed merchants which are specifically aimed at agricultural schemes. These include legume heavy herbal leys, rather than wildflower meadow mixes. The "wildflowers" in these mixes are more often than not fast growing cultivars. Does this matter? It depends. Some don't last very long or grow to an improbable size, for example. Anyway, they're super cheap and will qualify for a lot of the schemes out there.

The other "meadow mixes" which don't fall into our purview are "pictorial meadows". These are just flowers - no grasses - and can include pretty much any kind of annual, biennial or perennial species.   

The Ugly

We're licenced by DEFRA to market seeds, but DEFRA's plant passporting scheme is a more meaningful check. One of our competitors says they "are registered with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), so you can have confidence in both our products and advice". This is, frankly, utter b***s.  

Even so, you can guarantee most of the good folk on Amazon aren't authorised by anyone. The wildflower seeds sold on platforms like this could be Chinese, they could be triffids. The product images tell their own stories... yuk. They're often sold using the RHS's Plants For Pollinators logo, incidentally, in an effort to give them a figleaf of respectability. As for meadow mixes...