A Perfect Lawn?

An article in the July 2018 issue of the RHS magazine "The Garden" entitled 'Let your lawn go wild' lies behind the inspiration for this post, with the proviso that all views expressed in the post are my own and not to be attributed to any other person or body.

Lawn treatments are still in favour in our suburb if the local free magazine is to be believed.  Before and after advertisements show a scrubby variegated lawn replaced after five doses with a healthy, uniformly green one.  Vans visit our street on the same mission; transforming and then maintaining lawns.  Whence did this fashion for a weed-free lawn arise?  Was it from emulation of the rich and famous with their acres of greensward; the visits to pristine greens where many took their recreation in bowls; or did suburban householders of our previous century turn their attention to one of the few external matters they could control, their turf rolled and striped to geometric perfection?   Could the human desire for seventy years of unbroken good health have extended to the transient grass, to which human flesh is so often compared?   

At any rate, our lawn care is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of views, roughly equivalent to the position we take on the use of plastics and the ecosystem, i.e. we cannot do without them completely, but endeavour to reduce our use whenever possible.  Hence we, by which I mean my husband of course, still mow our lawn with an electric mower passed on to us by my family.  But he does not mow as often in the summer and he sets the blades higher than was the fashion when we were growing up.  This means that our lawn is chequered with clovers, daisies, buttercups and bugle.  We use no weedkillers and no fertilisers and every so often remove plantains and such like by hand.  Thus our lawn with its wild flowers is a like a little patch of the pre-World War Two pastures of lowland Lancashire.

The choice of lawn care is an individual one, as is the use of every back garden in this, our democratic society.  All I can do is to urge you, if you are concerned about wildlife and your lawn, to adopt the well known slogan: 'think globally, act locally'.  As you see the bumblebees and birds, once so common, descend on you, I believe you will consider yourself rewarded.