Close-up view of meadow flowers growing in the Great British Garden, at the Olympic Park, Stratford.
Close-up view of meadow flowers growing in the Great British Garden, at the Olympic Park, Stratford. The 250-hectare site in east London has been filled with 4,000 trees, 300,000 wetland plants, 15,000 square metres of lawns and more than 150,000 perennial plants, in an ambitious scheme designed to delight visitors to the Games and leave a legacy of a permanent park once the Olympics are over. First, there are the wildflower meadows, 10 football fields-worth of them, carefully planned and sown to reach their peak just in time for the torch's arrival in east London next Friday, and sporting a suitably Olympic gold colour scheme. Wildflowers are having a moment: sales of cornflowers, field poppies and other pollinator-friendly blooms have tripled this year, influenced by Sarah Raven's TV programme Bees, Butterflies And Blooms, and Chelsea show gardens packed with wispy natives. Professors Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough of the department of landscape at the University of Sheffield, who are behind the design of the park as a whole, want to grab gardeners' attention with the idea that wildflowers aren't weeds. Dunnett says the gardens are a "catalyst" for councils and home gardeners to ditch lawns and formal summer bedding in favour of mini-meadows: "We have designed the wildflower planting to be extremely high-impact and attention-grabbing," he says. "You can talk about the idea endlessly, but the very best and most persuasive advert is to see it for real. When people see this colourful naturalistic wildflower landscape, they become much less satisfied with what they generally see around them." A slender, 1-2 ft. annual with pinnately-compound foliage, tickseed is known for its small but abundant yellow flowers, painted maroon near the center. Numerous smooth, slightly angled branches bearing showy, daisy-like flower heads with yellow rays surrounding a reddish-purple central disk. The yellow petals are notch-tipped. Flower heads occur on long stalks from the mul
Size: 4064px × 2704px
Location: Olympic Park, Stratford, London.
Photo credit: © John Gaffen / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 2012, british, close-, flowers, garden, gardens, great, legacy, london, meadows, olympic, olympics, park, project, stratford, wildflower
