Meadowmat Cottage Garden – Do you enjoy seeing nodding flower heads, buzzing bees and vibrant colours combined with swaying grasses? Then you’ll love Meadowmat Cottage Garden!
Cottage Garden is a beautiful combination of native wildflowers and grasses to create a vibrant and bee-friendly cottage garden, literally, on a roll! A handy garden design tip is to lay the Cottage Garden on top of Spring and Summer flowering bulbs for an even longer flowering period. This ensures stunning turf for a dazzling looking garden in time for summer!
What’s Included
Cottage Garden is mainly created using perennial plant species. These are plants that will grow back year after year, as long as they enjoy the conditions in your garden. Therefore, this determines the importance of maintaining your garden and choosing the most suitable turf.
The mix also includes some annual and bi-annual flowering species. Some give a pop of colour while the perennials are blooming and some just because of their sheer beauty. However, not all of the flowers will appear every year but when they do, you’ll realise why Cottage Garden is worthwhile.
Flowering
The flowering time for Cottage Garden is late Spring until early Autumn, so it’s perfect for when you want to flaunt your garden in its best light throughout Spring, Summer and even during the colder months!
We would never want your Cottage Garden to be damaged in transit so we ensure that the plants are mowed before harvest and despatch. Your product is unlikely to be in flower when it is delivered to you, so this can be done naturally with the help of Mother Nature.
Installation
You can install Cottage Garden all year round. For a burst of colour in time for Summer, we suggest that you lay Meadowmat® before the end of March to allow plants to establish.
A roll of Cottage Garden Meadowmat® covers 1 square metre of prepared soil. It can be heavy – especially when it’s wet, so it’s a good idea to get some help when manoeuvring and laying it!
The images shown are just to give you an idea of how Cottage Garden looks when in bloom, but it can be presented differently depending on the look of your garden and your level of maintenance. Therefore, the balance of plant species and the flowering time will be different in every single garden giving you endless possibilities! However, it can also depend on soil type, weather conditions, pollinator populations and management style. Then, simply, unroll the Meadowmat® onto prepared soil, ensuring the roots have contact with the ground, water it and keep the soil moist until the plants are well established!
Maintenance
Maintaining Cottage Garden is easy and rewarding. Unlike many herbaceous flower borders, Cottage Garden doesn’t want to be fed, mulched, staked or sprayed. Simply leave it to grow unchecked between March and September. You may like to extend the flowering season by deadheading the plants, but this is not essential. At the end of summer, when all the flowers have faded, you can be ruthless and deadhead as much as you need. Cut your Cottage Garden back to a height of 10 – 15 cm and put all of that unwanted vegetation on to the compost heap. If your garden soil is quite fertile, you may need to trim it a couple of times during the autumn and winter, just to keep it neat.
Cottage Garden is fairly easy-going provided it has plenty of sunshine and a moist, but whilst ensuring well-drained soil. It’s great in deep planters, raised beds, flower borders or as an alternative to your original lawn! The plants in this Meadowmat® like a fairly neutral pH but can adapt to anything but the most acidic or alkaline soils.
To maintain the balance of grasses to flowering plants, we highly recommend installing Cottage Garden onto our Low Fertility Soil which you can buy here.
Richer soils tend to encourage lots of grasses and over time these can crowd out the flowering plants in Meadowmat®, leaving you with a less colourful display.
What’s In Meadowmat Cottage Garden?
Please note, percentages refer to the weight of the seed in the growing mix and do not necessarily reflect the proportions of mature plants.
5% native grasses
Grasses fill in any gaps between plants and provide activity outside of the flowering season. They also reduce moisture from the soil, so you’ll also be helping wildlife out with a place to stay in the colder months!
The 2 native grasses in Cottage Garden Wildflower Turf are Tufted hair grass and Brown top bent grass.
95% Flowering Plants
The other 95% of Cottage Garden Mix features 30 flowering plants, providing a joyous display of summer colour! These wildflowers are:
For more information about each flower, click on the article below
| Achillea Millefolium | Nettle Leaved Bellflower |
| Birdsfoot Trefoil | Ragged Robin |
| Bladder Campion | Red Campion |
| Columbine | Ribwort Plantain |
| Common Knapweed | Rose Campion |
| Common Mallow | Sweet Violet |
| Corn Chamomile | Thrift |
| Cornflower | Tufted Vetch |
| Cosmos Albatross | Viper’s Bugloss |
| Cosmos Gloria | White Breeze |
| Erigeron ‘Profusion’ | White Campion |
| Field Scabious | Wild Thyme |
| Linaria Northern Lights | Vervain |
| Meadow Saxifrage | Yarrow |
| Melton Pastels | Yellow Horned Poppy |
See our Product downloads below or visit our Help Centre for more detailed information on installing and maintaining Cottage Garden!
