For those of you hoping for a recipe for a particularly nice honey based alcohlic beverage – I’m very sorry but not today.

A flowery mead is a medieval lawn and it is an essential for a medieval garden. Basically the grass is studded by lots of little gem like flowers. All those medieval tapestries with unicorns tend to depict flowery means. The tapestries incidentally are often called mille fleurs – thousands of flowers. Albertus Magnus, a keen thirteenth century gardener and bishop to boot, recommended lawns with short grass – presumably he wasn’t the one doing the shearing.

So what might you need to create your own flowery mead and put the lawn mower away? These days I suppose we’d describe a flowery mead as a flower meadow.

Corn poppies, corn flowers, sweet violets, wild strawberries, flag iris and daisies, heartsease, cowslips, primroses, daisies, scabious, red clover, dianthus- to name a few and I bet that you’ve already got some hawkbit – as eaten by hawks to improve their eyesight….