We had a paved area under our Arbour at the bottom of our garden that was there when we bought our house. Unfortunately the roots of the Wisteria had got under the paving slabs and had lifted them up making the surface uneven and dangerous. We did have a table and chairs on it but we didn’t use it that much so we decided to move the table and chairs down to the patio near the house lift the slabs and replace them with a small wild flower meadow to encourage bumblebees, butterflies and other wildlife into our garden.

Lifting the slabs. This proved the easy part as we found that there was about a foot of rubble and cement underneath.

We had to hire a breaker for a day to break up the rubble and the cement.

We had to then dig out the rubble. As there was so much of it we decided the easiest thing to do was to hire a skip which we managed to just about fill. You can see the Wisteria roots that had undermined the paving slabs.

Having removed the rubble which we thought must have been at least a couple of tons we were left with a large hole to fill. We bought some low fertility soil which arrived in a 1 ton sack on a pallet and had to be barrowed down to the end of the garden. We found that the one ton only half filled the hole left by the removal of the rubble, so had to order a second ton of low fertility soil.

All the soil was tamped down as we put it in and then raked level. We decided to leave the soil for a couple of weeks to allow it to settle before we laid the turf.

We decided to lay some specialised Wild Flower Meadow turf which we ordered online. It arrived in rolls on a pallet and it was fairly easy to lay out onto the prepared surface.

The completed wild flower meadow turf in place and ready for watering.

When we planned our little wild flower meadow we decided that it would be good to extend it into the lawn and have a wild flower bed down the side of the lawn by our raised beds. This involved removing the original lawn turf by forking it up. As we needed the soil underneath the turf in order that it would be at the same level as the lawn we had to remove all the soil from the turfs that we had lifted. This took a while but we got there in the end.

The completed wild flower meadow bed in our lawn. It will be interesting to see how this looks as it grows up.

A good show of Ragged Robin in the new meadow.

Bumblebee enjoying the Ragged Robin in the meadow.