The Wildflower Experiment or Crazy for Daisies

The vast expanse of the "wildflower meadow".

Even vaster in this photo.

Last May Catherine and I had two large areas totaling almost half an acre rototilled with the plan of turning these patches into our "wildflower meadow". We had been convinced that this would be a good idea after being hypnotized looking at the website for "American Meadows". Still in our hypnotic trance, we spent an obscene amount of money on wildflower seeds and then in our freshly tilled plots followed the sowing instructions for the seeds to the letter. This included pulling, in tandem, a very heavy roller by hand over the newly tilled half acre, like two mules. (Try it and see if that doesn't test your marriage.) We then waited expectantly. And waited. And waited some more. Finally in late Summer about half of the area we had rototilled and sowed bloomed with mostly Cosmos. These are nice enough flowers, I guess, but they were primarily pink and Catherine's not crazy about pink. To say we were disappointed at the fruits of our labor is a bit like saying Hitler was disappointed when that Stalingrad thing didn't work out as planned. O.K., maybe he was a bit more disappointed than we are.
The mix of seeds we planted last year contained both annuals and perennials, so we re-rototilled the sections where almost nothing had come up and left the rest to see what the perennials would do . And low and behold this year daisies appeared in great profusion! Not hundreds of dollars worth of daisies which is what they ended up costing us, but enough for us to start talking again about our "wildflower meadow". Of course we never replanted the sections that we re-rototilled, so they now look like someone went out of their way to plant a "nasty weed meadow". The "nasty weed meadow" is thriving so far and we've invested no labor or money in it at all. Go figure.