Interview with Colin Reader, Founder & CEO of Wild Flower Lawns and Meadows Ltd

Colin grew up in southern England in the countryside spending most of his childhood on a farm with a love of wild flower meadows and nature. His passion led him to employment within conservation organisations but in the late 1990’s when his best friend lost his wife in tragic circumstances he switched jobs to help support him with his woodland consultancy business and out of the blue they landed a fascinating contract advising on and managing wildlife habitat restoration projects for a philanthropic family on a large country estate, many of these projects involved grassland areas which had lost their floral content. This serendipitous event was the start of his wild flower meadow journey. The owner of the estate gave him great support and freedom, allowing him to experiment with different methods for creating and restoring wild flower meadows on her land. At that time there was a lot of different advice being given from various organisations regarding how one should go about creating or restoring these special habitats. Colin trialled various methods, some did not work at all, he sowed the seeds but just grass came up and other methods produced a few wild flowers after a long period of time and others produced a profusion of weeds very quickly! He was convinced that there had to be better ways and quicker ways to create very floristic and diverse meadows.

It took time and experimentation but eventually he was able to reliably create colourful and diverse native wild flower grasslands in most situations and had learnt how to deal with the weed issues that dogged some of the earlier attempts. Colin began creating wild flower areas for other people and set up the current ‘Wild Flower Lawns and Meadows’ website originally as a hobby, expanding it with blogs sharing experience and knowledge gained in the field (literally) and the interest it created not only within the UK but internationally took him by surprise and now it is a multi-faceted company selling unique wild flower products and involved with more native wild flower projects than he could ever have imagined when he started.