Meadow Up Your Street is a River of Flowers campaign for 2012 to inspire people to use the space in their front gardens to create a haven of biodiversity. Walking along a street and seeing a meadow of glorious wildflowers flowing from front garden to front garden will lift the spirits of residents and visitors alike.

An urban meadow is a collection of diverse wildflowers, accompanied by wildlife, blooming in the urban environment in a variety of spaces including front gardens. If your front garden has trees in it, then growing woodland edge wildflowers as part of your urban meadow would be suitable, and these would provide bees and other insect pollinators with an early source of nectar and pollen as well.

Spring Wildflowers (Lesser Celandine and Dog Violet)

A front garden meadow can be grown using River of Flowers' Urban Meadow Kit, a 'starter' miniature meadow of native perennial wildflower plants grown in a recycled, biodegradable box, ready to be planted directly into the ground or into any garden container. The Urban Meadow Kit includes a packet of mixed annual and perennial wildflower seed so you can extend your front garden meadow up to the size of a dining table. A wildflower meadow needs management so you may prefer to keep your meadow quite small at first with the option of expanding it later.

By planting an Urban Meadow Kit in each front garden, you can create a linear meadow of pollen and nectar rich wildflowers all along your street to help support the vanishing bees, butterflies and other insect pollinators.

Please contact info@riverofflowers.org for more information on the Urban Meadow Kit whch will be available later in April. River of Flowers will be at a number of Festivals this year and the Urban Meadow Kit will be on display .A list of these Festivals will follow soon.

Acknowledgements

Street Meadow & Spring Wildflowers ©  Anne Carter Van Roy

Summer Blooms © The Landscape Architect's Journal

Summer Blooms (Cornflower, Field Poppy and Oxeye Daisy)

If you do anything in 2012, plant wild!