Why natives earn their place in a small garden

You do not need a meadow, a paddock or a field margin to grow wildflowers. A border two metres long and a metre deep will comfortably hold a dozen cowslips, a few clumps of ox-eye daisy and a patch of buttercup, and it will look deliberate rather than neglected. Native perennials are also remarkably good value in a small plot: they arrive early, they feed the bees and hoverflies that turn up in April when little else is open, and they shrug off our wet winters without any cosseting.

The trick is to stop treating them like border plants. Most of our grassland wildflowers evolved on thin, unimproved ground grazed short by sheep or cut late for hay. Give them rich soil, a generous mulch and a weekly feed and they will reward you with leaves rather than flowers. Give them the opposite and they will quietly get on with it.

Start with the soil, not the seed

Before you buy anything, look at where you intend to plant. A patch that bakes in summer, drains quickly and has never seen a bag of compost is ideal. A deep, dark, well-manured bed is the worst possible start.

• Choose the poorest corner you have — a strip against a south-facing wall, a gravelly edge, or the subsoil left behind by a new patio.
• Do not feed or mulch. No compost, no blood, fish and bone, no pelleted manure. Fertility encourages coarse grasses that swamp small wildflowers.
• If the soil is rich, skim off the top five to seven centimetres of turf and put it to one side for the veg patch. What is left underneath is usually perfect.
• Aim for about half bare ground when sowing or planting. Seedlings need light and a bit of open soil to get their roots down.
• Sun for at least half the day. Cowslips will take a little shade; ox-eye daisies and buttercups will not.

Plug plants are far more reliable than seed in a small garden. A dozen plugs set out 20 to 25 centimetres apart will fill a metre of border within two seasons, and you can see exactly where they are rather than wondering which green shoots are weeds.

Cowslips: the earliest reward

Cowslip (Primula veris) is the plant to start with if you only try one. It flowers in April and May, when the garden is still short of colour, sending up nodding clusters of soft lemon-yellow from a neat rosette of crinkled leaves no more than 25 centimetres across. It suits the front of a border, the foot of a hedge or a spot beneath fruit trees.

Plant plugs in autumn or early spring. Water them through their first dry spell, then leave them alone. Let the seed set and scatter — cowslips seed themselves politely into gaps without ever becoming a nuisance. If you want more, collect the seed in June when the capsules turn brown, and scatter it thinly on raked bare soil straight away. It needs a spell of cold to germinate, so an autumn sowing outdoors works better than a windowsill.

They look well with primroses, violets and forget-me-nots, and they tolerate slightly kinder soil than the meadow species, which makes them useful at the edge of a border.

Ox-eye daisies: height without thuggery

Ox-eye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare) gives you white flowers with golden centres from late May into August, on stems 60 to 90 centimetres tall. It is a short-lived perennial, so it relies on setting seed to keep going — which means it will wander, but rarely in a way that takes over.

Place it in the middle or back of the border, not at the front where its loose stems will flop over smaller plants. Cut the whole clump back to about ten centimetres after the first flush of flowers and it will usually give you a second, smaller showing in late summer, with tidier growth. Leave a few seed heads standing in September and the goldfinches will deal with them for you. If it self-sows more freely than you would like, deadhead before the petals drop.

Meadow buttercups: handle with care

Meadow buttercup (Ranunculus acris) is the one to think about before you plant it rather than after. Those golden flowers are glorious in late May, but the plant spreads by creeping stems and has a root system that is almost impossible to dig out cleanly once it is settled. In a small border it will win.

Give it the dampest, roughest corner you have — beside a shed, along a boundary, or in a patch of lawn you are happy to leave unmown until June. Mowing is your control: raise the cut height in May so it can flower, then cut normally afterwards. If buttercups already grow in your lawn, simply letting them flower for three weeks in spring is one of the cheapest wildlife improvements you can make.

Keeping it easy year after year

A wildflower patch of this size should take ten minutes a week in spring and almost nothing in winter. A simple rhythm keeps it looking cared for:

• Late February: cut back last year's stems, rake off the debris, and hand-weed any coarse grass that has crept in.
• April and May: enjoy it. No feeding, no staking, no deadheading unless you want to limit seeding.
• June to July: cut half the patch to ten centimetres and leave the other half for seed. This staggered approach keeps colour going and stops everything looking shorn at once.
• September: collect ripe seed, scatter it on raked bare soil, and water only if the weather turns dry.
• Autumn: plant new plugs and move anything that has ended up in the wrong place. Divide crowded clumps every third year.

Resist the urge to tidy too thoroughly. A little bare earth in autumn, a few seed heads left standing into winter and a reluctance to mulch are all part of the method. Do that, and a border barely wider than a garden bench will give you cowslips in April, daisies in June and buttercups in between — with very little asked of you in return.