Designer Sam Taylor-Hunt shares his design for a vibrant, perennial, meadow-style scheme you can sow direct from seed, with advice on how to create this exciting new type of planting
ILLUSTRATIONS HANNAH McVICAR
As a garden designer and soft landscaper, I’ve put together my fair share of beautiful borders, planting countless spring bulbs, small pots and bareroot roses. But recently my imagination has been set alight by a completely new way of creating riotously colourful beds of herbaceous plants, with a planting style and process known as a seeded perennial meadow (SPM).
You may have seen SPMs used to amazing effect by Professors James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, created for the 2012 London Olympics. Since then, SPMs have started popping up in botanical gardens, such as Oxford and RHS Garden Wisley, and large charity-held estates, including Chatsworth House.
What is an SPM?
An SPM is, in short, an area of dense planting that returns every year, composed of herbaceous perennials and grasses, grown predominantly from seed sown directly on to a prepared substrate.
SPMs are markedly different from our UK native meadows. Most keen gardeners will be familiar with grass-dominant native UK meadows and can recognise wildflowers like knapweed, ragged robin and (sometimes) rare wild orchids. We mark the seasons with their arrival in May, and their mowing at the end of the summer.
SPMs are designed to stay standing for the whole growing season, with flower colour starting in April, and running right through to autumn, providing more beauty and cover for wildlife than any standard native meadow.
When designing an SPM, I’m looking to create a high degree of density within the planting, as well as variety in leaf textures, and distinctions between different height layers. Regular UK meadows typically grow to a single height – imagine walking through thigh-high pasture. SPMs, on the other hand, usually have around 80-120 plants per square metre, with clear layers of planting and much more diversity in height, with some of the flowers reaching above head height.
Choosing the right plants
When putting together a seed list for an SPM, I draw on plants from around the globe, taking inspiration from landscapes ranging from the North American prairies to the South African Drakensberg. Each of these plants has evolved to exploit different niches, to grow and flower at different times of the year. By combining them in the right proportion
