One of my lovely clients made the recent decision, with encouragememt from myself, to replace his traditional lawn with a 'Tapestry Lawn'. A tapestry lawn is made up of swathes of evergreen flowering ground cover plants which are benificial to pollinators and provides an everchanging colourful and fragrant carpet.
Soil preparation was key ensuring that it was poor and free draining in the top 3/4 where it is sunniest and enriched towards the bottom where the shade tolerant plants are. This was how the lawn looked newly planted with plug plants. The advice was that the lawn would take around a year to fully establish but I've been pleasantly surprised by the speed at which is has grown.
Daily watering by my dilligent client and warmer weather has encouraged the ground cover plants to knit together quickly. The Mentha pulegium and Chamomile in particular have grown strongly. This is month 2.
And then in month 3 we have cut back some of the taller species to around 5-10cm tall to allow the slower growing to catch up. This is before the cut.
And this is after. You can start to see the differences in colour and texture of the different swathes of plants.
And here are some close up of the flowers seen so far. Trifolium pratense (Red Clover).
Campunala and Prunella vulgaris (self heal)
I look foward to seeing how this progresses and encourage those of you with a traditional lawn, which takes alot of mainteance and isn't really used, to consider replacing it with a tapestry lawn, which provides vital food for the insects and enjoyment of the senses for you.
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