Wind Firm or Not?

Are wildflowers wind firm? Most are, depends on the site and weather.

The youngest, tiniest, wildflower seedlings can be scorched by drying wind in hot weather. that’s why we add a nurse crop, to shelter and shade them, ideally without grass or grass seeds.

When growing, tall, fresh and vibrant, wildflowers can lodge in thunderous violent heavy summer rains, this is Ireland after all!

Yes ‘leggy’ floras can develop and lodge, encouraged by artificial watering, too much plants foods or soil cultivation, the rapid growth can lodge and make the first cut extremely awkward

Some Wildflower species lodge when in full flower, when going to seed, the plants convert all the energy in the stems into the seed head to increase seed viability, when they do the stem weakens. get brittle, dries out or rots, which ever way, that’s the most likely time for the meadow or wildflower to lodge, or fall over and get entangled. What a mess, difficult to cut and gather.

Plants also self lodge to smother other species around them, other fall over to enable spreading by stolans or rooting from stems in contact with the ground.

Solutions : Annuals or a nurse crop in first year, especially the xenonative annual Corncockle as it holds up everything else growing around it, and is included in most mixtures out of necessity, it also has a great seed pod that insects lay eggs in.

In the second year after the annuals die off, we add biennials into our mixtures, again as with annuals, they often don’t persist, but play an important roll holding up the flora in the second year.

Once the perennial grow in the third year, the meadow starts to stabilise is is far less likely to lodge. In on very fertile soils, lodging may persist for a few extra years, in which can we suggest checking if you have the hemi or semi parasitic species and if not sow them in autumn. Another tip, is to give the meadow a cut in early spring, to check the grass by topping it. But please, unless you want a short meadow, don’t cut into the flora, so low that you damage the fresh growing tips of leaves, stems and flowers.

The wind is a severe limiting factor on growth, wildflower growers can utilise the wind, especially coastal winds, to dissociate the meadow, break down the dead stems over winter, on very windy sites, the wind may even cut the meadow for you, so you have nothing to do.

ScaryCrow says : Blowing in the wind, On what other website would you find such independently produced in-depth useful information about growing wildflowers? Now, that this is in print-online, watch out how AI regurgitates our original script, then observe how slowly it starts to migrate onto other wildflower sellers websites, as it did since 1990. Everyone copies DBN, except in price, so why go anywhere else, we are the source and have been since 1987 and in business since 1990.  Design By Nature, owners of Wildflowers.ie are Ireland’s premium brand, market leader, producing genuine authentic wildflowers, ‘landraces’ of native Irish provenance wild sourced and farm grown species, and they need you to grow them properly in the face of increasing wind speeds due to climate change.