Into The Weeds

What No Mow May tells us about who we are

I wrote a piece for this weekend’s Financial Times about the No Mow May campaign, and how it has (or hasn’t) moved from gardens into public green spaces. It ended up being the second most read piece online (nice) which says something about people’s interest in this. There were a lot of comments underneath about the problem of ticks. I guess that says more about the kind of people who comment on articles, rather than the problem of ticks.

The piece was short, so I thought I might weave in here some of the parts which didn’t make it and my thoughts about it. Because actually it wasn’t really about No Mow May, which even the director of the charity Plantlife - who began the campaign and who was clearly a bit frustrated about how literally the ‘May’ bit had been interpreted - said was ‘just a hashtag’.

It was really about how we see the natural world and our relationship with it, layering green spaces with our own conditioning and beliefs not about nature but about us. By which I mean: we infuse ourselves into our gardens, parks and communal spaces. When we have been taught what is beautiful and what is good, this directly affects what these spaces look like and, by extension, what can live within them. And what cannot. And what we believe to be beautiful and good is more about us than the places we use those descriptors for.

Lambeth’s sign on the school run

A garden, like a farm, is a space over which we exert our control of nature in a continual battle which sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. With a farm we do this because we are trying to grow food. A garden is different. Our control of it is almost always to do with how we want the garden to make us feel which, in its own way, is tangled up with what we want our garden to say about us. We have made our green spaces all about us: both private and public.

A cultivated garden with clipped, mown grass has complicated roots. The word ‘lawn’ is Middle English for barren land. Only the wealthy could afford to plant, water and cut land that had no benefit to it other than leisure and so the idea of short controlled grass became, in a way, aspirational, until you end up with a Truman Show style scene of middle class men in rolled up shirt sleeves delighting in taking a mower to their garden on a Saturday morning. Or, as this piece puts it: ‘the act of pushing a mower around possesses an almost primordial appeal’.

me and my sister bouncing on my uncle in my grandparent’s immaculate garden

During the 1700s the vogue of pastoralism romanticised a landscape that appeared grazed, and birthed the age of the landscaped garden as defined by designers such as Capability Brown, whose name came about because of way he saw country estates as having ‘great capability for improvement’ by landscaping.

It’s hard to underestimate how these highly controlled views and vistas influenced what we think of as beautiful. And natural. None of them are ‘natural’, not least because this land would once have been covered by wood which had been removed save for lone trees left in parkland to draw your eye through the landscape. Now only 2% of this remains in little pockets of native temperate rainforest, such as the one hidden away at Cabilla Cornwall (more on this soon).

We look at these landscapes and because they appear like the lid of a biscuit tin, we believe what we have been told: they are beautiful. Our language has encouraged this. Up until recently many of our parks were officially called Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, until Julian Glover’s National Parks Review decided that maybe the ‘beauty’ part of this was a bit subjective given that while one person will see a heavily grazed or closely clipped area of grass as beautiful, another might see the loss of the wild abundance that once lived upon it. Or as the great Michael Pollen once said about a closely cropped lawn in his 1989 essay, ‘Why Mow’, as ‘nature starved of sex and death’.

There are real consequences to this, of course, and not just for the bees and trees. I wonder what Michael Pollen would have written about the £2bn global vogue for carpeting our city gardens in astro-turf which is, of course, not turf but plastic. One in nine people take out their lawn and replace it with something pretending to be grass. The insurance company Aviva has predicted that destroying our ability to absorb heavy rainfall by letting it soak into the soil and causing it instead to sluice off into overwhelmed gutters is what is going to help drown London. Tube closures because of flooding are a pretty good warning sign of this.

But as well as consequences, there is also potential. In the UK, gardens make up nearly 5% of the total land area. In English this covers an area more than four and a half times greater than all the country’s nature reserves combined. 23% of Greater London is private domestic garden.

The piece I wrote was about the power of public spaces, rather than gardens. Here too there is potential, although this time some of it has been realised. Road verges, which now cover 1.2% of all the UK - more land than wildflower meadows - have undergone a transformation as an accidental consequence of austerity.

Mowing was expensive. Less mowing meant longer grass. Longer grass meant the cuttings had to be taken away or piled up, not left to mulch down. This reduced the fertility of verges. Wildflowers thrive in low fertility soil. Now, thanks to seedbanks which can lie dormant for decades waiting for the right conditions to grow, nearly half all UK species of wildflower are growing on our verges.

Changing what we do with tamed greenspace, both public and private, could be seismic not just for nature but for us.

So despite the headline, the piece wasn’t really about May. It was about how the way our green spaces look have influenced how we see ourselves as separate from nature; how we have made them carry our own burdens and fashions. And that maybe being challenged about this might help dismantle this solipsistic way of seeing the world around us.

As I scooted back from the school run this morning I went past the wild patches outside the tower block I wrote about and stopped by a long patch of bright yellow buttercups, growing tall out of the wild grasses. I bent to pick some: to put them in a vase at home like I often do with flowers some call weeds.

I thought again of what it means to let things grow. What it means to release our control and so release our fear about what others think of us - and what we think of ourselves - by doing so. How by relaxing our control of an external world we are also relaxing control of an internal one, especially other peoples’ thoughts and views of us which are really nothing to do with us, and none of our business anyway.

I thought about it means and feels like to do this. And what pure, bright beauty is finally able to grow when we do.

To read:

• On 23rd April I did a FANE event with Poppy Okotcha at the launch of her debut book, A Wilder Way. It’s a hybrid book - the best kind - mixing memoir with folklore, history, recipes and advice on how to grow a nature rich garden which feeds us, our families, our communities and the world around us. I loved our conversation a lot. Also her baby and dog turned up at the end which made everyone melt (mostly me).

• Marion Boswell’s new book - The Kindest Garden - is infused with lines that ask us to look at control differently, such as this one:

  ‘Before you dig out a weed, consider what it is telling you (about the soil) and how you might benefit from it, either in a tea for yourself, in compost or tea for your plants, or as forage.’

  The clue is in the name, but the whole book is a practical plea to go more lightly as we create a garden so that maybe in being kinder to the nature we are tending, we may end up being a bit kinder to ourselves too.

• As I mention in the piece, the ecological newsletter InkCap, edited by writer Sophie Yeo, did an incredible bit of research about public maintenance of green spaces which included discovering that the poorest London Borough, Tower Hamlets, was spending £10,000 a year on mowing 0.12 miles of grass verge. There’s a lot more in the two-part investigation and it’s worth reading if only for the success stories of what happened to councils’ greenspaces (and budgets) when they rowed back on the mowing.

• This guardian piece by Patrick Greenfield (I know….) which amongst a deep dive on wildflowers growing in verges also introduced me to the excellent story of England’s rarest plants - still the only known native fenland ragwort - which was discovered by a French botanist who “identified it whilst relieving himself in a lay-by in the 1960s” . You’re welcome.