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One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight Earlier that year a canopy of Portland stone had been erected over the entrance to the underground, part of London’s preparations for the Olympics, and through a rectangular frame in the structure, at the edge of the park, a tangle of colour appeared A patch of wildflowers was growing there, next to the manicured shopping streets of Mayfair A sign said the meadow had been planted as part of some scheme This sounded like a paradox: I didn’t know that wildflowers could be planted, let alone meadows I was struck by a correspondence between this artificial meadow and the rioting that had taken place in the city that summer, which had been framed as an irruption of wildness   In his Politics Aristotle claims that humans surpass bees in their political nature, and philosophers have often used bees to describe the political nature of humans Meadows, where the social desires of bees are fulfilled – if you can call them desires – have been overlooked as a form for thinking about politics The wildflower meadow, increasingly endangered and artificially produced in the twenty-first century, describes a relationship between individual and environment that is both complex and immediate The appearance of wildness in the city becomes a question of aesthetics, which is to say, a question of how the relationship between an event and its frame produces certain effects, and of politics, when an act of observation decides which events are wild and which are cultivated by human policy   Wildflowers in the British Isles have historically been concentrated in areas of semi-natural grassland, often maintained for the production of hay for livestock, sometimes left uncultivated for other reasons and tramped through by grazing animals whose digestive systems redistribute seeds and produce the special diversity of the meadow In the seventeenth century, the English mystic Thomas Traherne described meadows ‘more Divine than if Covered with Emeralds’ He saw the meadows as a book in which a message had been written: just as God makes water available