[timclark]

My key reading from the article was over-fertility leads to mono-culture, so paradoxically you need to reduce soil fertility to encourage diversity.

Reducing soil fertility probably needs intervention to remove rotting vegetation etc.

I am guessing that at one point in time native plants would have had animals and insects that were eating them and maybe reducing soil fertility.

[noelwelsh]

^This (which is the same thing both the original article and the RHS article said). Grass will out compete wild flowers if the fertility of the soil is too high. Either:

- get rid of the grass

- mow it very short

and then plant wild flowers. Just throwing seeds onto the lawn will do nothing.

To get rid of grass either:

- dig it out (easy in the right soil; very hard in clay which is a lot of the UK)

- cover it with cardboard, cover the cardboard with soil, and plant on top.

I'm currently converting our front lawn to wild flowers. Luckily we don't have clay so I'm able to dig out the grass.

[pfdietz]

I think the reduced fertility was because the fields were being used to make hay, rather than being cut and the cuttings allowed to rot in place. The minerals in the hay were removed from the field, gradually depleting the soil.