‘Why I’m not the devil incarnate for having a lawn’

Salt Of The Earth, a gardening column by Sam Hawcroft

I’ve got a confession to make.

I’ve been watching the football instead of Gardener’s World.

I mean, come on – I was your Hull City columnist before the end of the league season, after all, and I’m going to have a Monty Don binge-fest the moment the Euros are over, I promise you.

But that’s not to say I haven’t been doing any ‘jobs for the weekend’ or keeping on top of watering the tomatoes. The indoor plants are doing well [I’ve got a couple of gherkin plants that are going crazy] – as are my sprout plants; the sweetcorn and squash are still looking a bit scrawny, though.

Everything is really late this year, as it’s been so unseasonably cold for much of our so-called summer, and I think the outdoor plants that like a bit of heat are suffering a bit. April was dry and cold, May was wet and cold, June was just… mainly cold.

Following my first gardening column last month, I was expecting comments about the fact that we have a fairly sizeable lawn, and indeed there were one or two grumblings.

So, for those who think I’m the devil incarnate for owning a lawnmower, please indulge me as I attempt to mount a defence of my green sward [Sward – what a great word that is]. As you may know, I live rurally in south Holderness. I could create a meadow in my own back garden, but we are already surrounded by fields and meadows.

‘JOBS FOR THE WEEKEND’: Sam’s been keeping on top of watering her tomatoes

There’s increasing importance placed on the idea of ‘wildlife corridors’ – and we live right in the middle of one. There are hedgerows, verges packed with cow parsley and vast swathes of grassland within yards of our house.

I feel it’s of less importance to create a meadow out here than, say, in the concrete jungle of central Hull, where the mini-meadows on roundabouts and along major routes such as Mount Pleasant bring in pollinators, birds and other wildlife and provide a ‘corridor’ to help them move safely on to other places.

If you do live in a built-up area and have a small lawn it might be more beneficial for wildlife if you turned some of it over to long grass. If you only have a yard and a shed, you could try growing a ‘green roof’ on it; even a porch or balcony could host a few pots with wildflower seeds chucked in.

Gardening is, by its very nature, unnatural. Of course, the gardeners of today are increasingly trying to work with nature rather than against it, but still, whatever we’re doing, we’re moulding and shaping our personal space to what works for us in terms of design and practicality.

And I happen to think that having a patch of mown grass nicely offsets our somewhat chaotic borders – and packed into those borders are a whole load of pollinator-friendly plants such as catmint, geraniums, poppies, foxgloves, lavender and more.

Incidentally, if you’re buying border plants, try to go for ones with ‘single’ flowers that allow pollinators easy access to the nectar; ‘double’ roses, hollyhocks, dahlias and the like might look amazing but are no good to the bees. And to paraphrase The Shamen, bees are good, bees are good, whooaaaa, bees are good!

Ahem.

MEADOW: Gardeners are increasingly trying to work with nature

So, yes, I’ve got a lawnmower, but I don’t go crazy with it; heck, the British weather is usually so rubbish I couldn’t mow it every week even if I wanted to, so there are a fair few daisies and clovers in there at any given point. I’m not obsessed about having Wimbledon-style stripes.

And I have started a wildflower patch – I dug it over last summer and covered it with weed suppressant for a few months before sowing in late autumn – and it is now full of poppies, buttercups and daisies, and I’ve added a few borage plants that I sowed in spring.

I just don’t think I want to do this with the whole lawn, though, as it’s a big area and managing a wildlife meadow isn’t as easy as just sitting back and letting the whole thing grow. Not if you want a host of dancing reds, yellows, whites and blues.

Even the small area I’ve started is becoming dominated by grass, thistles and horsetail [the roots of the latter can snake for several metres underground, so this is a battle I fear I’ll never win], and I don’t think a monoculture of thug weeds is particularly great either. Diversity is key, as different species of plants can attract different species of pollinator, and achieving the right balance requires careful maintenance.

And a lawn’s not all bad. It provides space to play, relax and, even more importantly, it’s a natural air-conditioner, significantly cooling the surface and air around it, which you’ll know if you’ve ever walked barefoot on the grass on a hot day. Grass also captures CO2, absorbs rainwater and helps combat soil erosion.

Save your ire for the real baddies – those who rip up their lawns and replace them with plastic ones. I only realised that people did this when I saw, to my horror, companies promoting such services on Twitter, and the resulting pile-on going viral.

While I’m not sure that directing abuse at a company online is the best thing to do, I really do wonder how the purveyors of such plastic abominations sleep at night. OK, putting a small patch on an existing area of concrete maybe isn’t as bad, but people actually do rip up their entire lawns and cover them over in this horrible stuff.

‘SAVE YOUR IRE’: A lawn’s not all bad

Fake grass has a very short shelf life compared with other landscaping materials; weeds do eventually pop through, and a few years down the line when it’s looking tatty it’ll have to be taken up and dumped in landfill as it’s difficult, if near-impossible, to be recycled. It also does real harm to the millions of micro-organisms in the soil, and it prevents birds from pecking at the worms beneath.

Please, I implore you – don’t be swayed by thinking it’s the easy option. It’s not – it’s expensive to install, difficult to clean, and disconnects you from nature. Fake grass companies will try to tell you otherwise and even claim that they’re helping the environment. It’s total rubbish – how can smothering your garden in plastic ever be good for nature? And as one botanist said, “Children can’t make a daisy-chain on a plastic lawn.”

However, for the next few hours, I’ll be more concerned with the turf – and the action on it – at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. Depending on what happens there, Monty Don might have to wait another week or so before he gets my undivided attention…