Garden Guru: Call of the wild

Pre-prepared wildflower mixes cater to all tastes and garden situations, and bring a carefree beauty to areas that may otherwise be tricky to manage. Photo / Supplied

Ripping up lawn is always a pleasure when you know that something far more interesting is going in its place. You'll feel horribly guilty if it's some rich, green, normally lovingly manicured baize that you are laying into with a spade, but if you wait until now, when your grass is no doubt looking bleached and half-dead after summer's onslaught, you can pretend that you are doing everyone a favour by removing an eyesore.

There are plenty of good reasons for doing away with a traditional lawn, for not only is it demanding of your time, it would eat its way through a shed-full of fertilisers and quaff a swimming pool's worth of your mains water supply given half a chance.

Gravel gardens are far less work, though nowhere near as comfy to lie about on, but at present I'm giving over a chunk of my lawn to wildflowers.

When I worked at Ayrlies - Bev McConnell's Auckland garden - there was time and space for plenty of jiggling of sophisticated plants in the flower beds, but it was a small patch of grass I got rid of that still fills me with the greatest pride.

From the daffodils in late winter to the belladonna lilies of autumn, this slice of awkwardness under the birch trees became a pool of colour, and all the maintenance it took was a careful weed through in spring and a trim and rake in April. Trees are always a chore to cut lawn around and a grove of seven can leave you with vertigo, so I persuaded my enlightened boss to let me loose with a can of herbicide.

If you prefer to avoid chemicals, surprisingly large areas of lawn can be rolled up with nothing more than a carefully aimed sharp spade.

An alternative way to rid yourself of grass is to roll out a length of carpet or thick polythene over it and allow your lawn to fester away in the darkness but, as with animals, I think plants deserve a quick death, so I reach for the weedkiller every time.

The point of wildflowers is that they look carefree and ever-so-slightly abandoned, and that means it's best to try and mass plant over as large an area as possible. Wildflower seed companies do the work for you by devising all sorts of ready mixes, from tall to short and early to late to those suited for particular conditions, such as the shade under trees. Back at Ayrlies, the main players were perennials. The staples were the sort of escaped exotics you see along road verges, such as clover, ox-eye daisy and a tough creeping verbena I found growing among rocks near Cathedral Cove, but in the garden such wildings can take over.

Seed companies opt for gentler annual exotics, which are easier to manage. Usually from Mediterranean climes, they prefer a light soil. On heavy clay, put down a 5cm layer of fine bark mixed with sand to provide an impoverished seedbed, which will mean your wildflowers won't grow too lush and flop about.

Today's blends of wildflowers are wild only in terms of their simple flowers' form and their ability to seed madly. And it's the seeding you need to nurture if you are to maintain the sort of displays you see along motorway verges.

Councils have to re-do their efforts every few years, but you can avoid this if you allow your mini-meadow to run out of steam unfettered in autumn so plenty of seed ripens and falls to the ground. If you judiciously clear away the dead carcasses and scuff up the soil surface with a rake at the end of the season, enough seed will germinate to repeat the display the following year and you can dibble in any number of bulbs to boost the show and spread the season.

This is just the right time to prepare your soil and order and sow seed.

Steep banks or between trees are great places to roll out the innocence of a flowery mead, but anywhere you take the bull by the horns and banish the lawn will look a million times better

Top wildflowers

* Granny's bonnet (Aquilegia vulgaris). A reliable and dainty favourite - good for early colour and it will come up year after year.
* Californian poppy (Eschscholzia californica). Ferny grey leaves and sparkling citrus colours from lemon to tangerine - these love full sun and need a light soil.
* Dwarf plains coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria). Late-flowering but worth the wait with its long-lasting maroon and gold daisies on tall plants. Good for damp or dry soils.
* Cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus). This is a staple of taller annual meadows with dainty divided foliage and saucers of pink, crimson or white all summer. Tolerant of poor soils.
* Purple tansy (Phacelia tanacetifolia). Comfrey-like rather ungainly growth but the pale blue/mauve flowers of this annual are a real magnet for beneficial insects.