No Mow May

No Mow May was all very well, but now my garden looks a mess.

You know how it goes: you try to do the right thing and it backfires, with knobs on. Leaving the lawn to grow for a month (or three), unbothered by me and my mower, seemed a great idea, coinciding as it did with a really busy time here at Weather It HQ. Provide a food source for bees and other pollinators AND save myself an onerous weekly garden task? It’s a win-win surely. And it was. To start with. But now two weeks into June after some sudden downpours and a run of hot weather, things are looking a bit, well, ‘unkempt’ would be the polite term (‘bloody awful’ the more truthful).

Finally mowing it made it look even worse. You know those jokes that go: “Who cut your hair? The Council?!”, well that’s my lawn – short bits, long bits, whispy bits and bald bits; patches that are green, patches that are brown, and just… patches. Like a haircut you did yourself. At night. Blind-folded and with a blunt razor. Leaving me wondering whether I should’ve just left it well alone.

What went wrong? Well, for a start: leaving a previously fairly well-kept lawn to grow just means you get long grass. I didn’t get any flowers to speak of. I guess the benefit to wildlife comes from allowing poorer, more weedy lawns to grow? I can see how allowing daisies and dandelions, perhaps the occasional yarrow, to do their thing could work.

Secondly, it just looks odd. The sudden switch from the ‘ornamental’ to the ‘wild’, from the cultivated plants in the borders to free-ranging, lush green – then mostly hay-like – grass, really jars. Like wearing flip flops with a three-piece suit. I mean some people can pull it off, but it’s a fairly unique aesthetic.

And lastly: what now? The lawn will recover and regrow no doubt, but I can’t help thinking that these annual shenanigans aren’t really helping anyone let alone the bees.

So what’s the answer?

I guess, the nuclear option would be to pull up the grass completely (and turn it into a compost/turf heap), and either leave the bare soil and see what pops up, or sow grass and flower meadow seeds over it and hope for the best; then gradually change the planting in adjacent flower beds to something a bit more naturalistic.

Leaving a more out-of-the-way area to go wild seems a much easier option; somewhere at the bottom of the garden where pollinators and other wildlife can enjoy it undisturbed. If it really does look too messy for you, mowing a strip around the edges (like a frame), and/or wending a simple mown path through it, at least gives it an ‘intentional neglect’ – rather than a ‘I couldn’t be bothered’ – feel.

But my favourite idea, perhaps not surprisingly, is the one where you just use a planter, or two, or three, to create mini meadows. You could put them anywhere – the bottom of the garden, in with the veg beds, or even just on top of some uninspiring paving. I quite fancy doing a damp meadow, a corn meadow and a shady, grassy one too…

But perhaps I’m running ahead of myself. Maybe my dream of ‘rewilding’ my whole garden simply needs to start with being just being at peace with the ‘mess’.