04-07-2025
Stop mowing your lawn. It's good for wildlife and your soul
You don't need a peer-reviewed paper and full biodiversity survey to differentiate the two halves of King's College lawn. On one side of Cambridge's most famous back garden, all is as it should be.
Immaculate grass sweeps down to the Cam. On the other side there is messiness. The stripes are gone, the grass has grown and a lot else has flourished besides. Like a miniature rainforest, each plant jostles, seeking to poke through the thick canopy. Underground there is, presumably, more disorder — as generations of head gardeners spin in their graves. Let them spin.
Quietly, spreading like wind-blown poppy seeds, insinuating itself like yellow rattle, an idea has taken root. What if we tried, occasionally, not mowing our grass? You have probably noticed this trend.
There's the public park with long grass at the boundary or weeds growing under trees. There's the roadside verge that used to be a stubbly, yellowed desert, but today rustles bushily in the breeze of passing cars. And, rustling above, there are butterflies.
We don't know with great accuracy what is happening to insects. What studies we do have show it's not good. Our springs are increasingly silent, our windscreens increasingly unsplattered. There are many reasons for this, some complex. There is a potential solution that isn't: stop making green monocultures.
Most environmental challenges were unavoidable. We would always have burnt fossil fuels and chopped down trees. But the idea that a garden should have a tightly cut lawn? That's a little more idiosyncratic. In the 18th century, Capability Brown, tasked with landscaping the great country homes, sought to model the grazed grass of bucolic idylls. This style, which without sheep required a lot of labour, became aspirational. When the rotary mower did away with the need for scythe-wielding peasants, it became an aspiration the masses could achieve.
It is not unreasonable to think you could rerun history and have very different gardens. Is this what is now happening? The fightback began, probably, with No Mow May. Like a horticultural version of Movember, but for bushy lawns rather than upper lips, this scheme by the charity Plantlife has given dads licence to put their feet (and Flymo) up for four weeks.
But the real revolution has been civic. Councils, seeing that most unlikely of congruences, virtuousness and thriftiness, have been delighted. Scores officially follow No Mow May. Many have found it convenient to extend into Let It Bloom June. Then, Make The Verges Jolly July has become The Council Is Bust August.
Will it work? You don't, as I said, need a biodiversity survey to understand why insects would prefer the wildflowers. But this is Cambridge, there are a lot of fellows at high table to convince and a lot of PhDs on hand to do the convincing. So they did a survey anyway. The results? On the wildflower bit they found 25 times the mass of invertebrates. Above, there were three times as many bats.
So, yes, I think the no-mow revolution should continue. But, in truth, I think it should do so because of another species: homo sapiens. Capability Brown got it wrong. Grass is boring. For a truly grand garden that really uplifts the soul, you need a bit of messiness.
