Last year, I sowed my garden with meadow wildflower perennials, and by summer there was an impressive display of corncockles, harebells, poppies, lupins and cornflowers. In October they were cut and the area left. This year not a single bloom has appeared. What happened?
It sounds as if the mix was more annual than perennial: poppies, corncockles and cornflowers are a combination of annuals and biennials that need open ground to germinate well. I wonder if they were outcompeted for ground by the perennials.
With wildflower meadows, you tend to find the first year is very good, then the mix finds a balance: some things are crowded out, others settle in. Corncockles do best from a spring sowing, too, so perhaps the seed rotted off over winter.
I imagine the following year you’ll get the perennials flowering again; you may have to resow the annuals in spring. Collecting the corncockle seed by hand and storing it somewhere dry over winter may do the trick here. For the rest, cut them back earlier, leaving the seedheads to drop for a couple of days and then removing the material so there is more light around the plants for germination in spring.
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