Britons urged to stop mowing lawns to boost butterfly numbers ‘in long-term decline’
https://news.sky.com/story/britons-urged-to-stop-mowing-lawns-13340331
Posted by topotaul
Britons urged to stop mowing lawns to boost butterfly numbers ‘in long-term decline’
https://news.sky.com/story/britons-urged-to-stop-mowing-lawns-13340331
Posted by topotaul
46 Comments
Thats all fine and well, but if someone paid £300,000 to have the privilege of a back garden, chances are they want to use it for stuff, not let it grow wild.
Capitalism/Environmental concern….. Pick one.
I’ve left the top corner of my garden grow wild over the last couple of years. Not only is it buzzing with insects and butterflies, but its attracted all kinds of birds and small animals. This year I have put in a small pond, and hope to get some frogs coming in as well.
You don’t need to turn your entire garden over to nature. Even just a small part can do wonders.
No thanks, I have 2 mini meadow areas for wildflowers and such to grow a little bit wild to encourage all manner of insects. The lawn will always remain tidy and trimmed.
Not forgetting the insect killers.
AKA farmers, with their love of pesticides.
do not underestimate the british middle classes obcession with their fucking lawns
Stop spraying toxic crap that’s killed so many insects.
Tried a clover lawn the last year. Was amazing for wildlife but its only now coming back so back to regular lawn
We would love to see you over at r/RewildingUK if you’re interested in nature restoration stuff
I tried explaining this to my landlord, no dice. I have a little barrel pond though to try and help nature but the garden has gotta be trimmed millimetres from death apparently.
When/if I get my own place I hope to create something a bit more environmentally friendly.
Can someone tell my neighbour, who seems to mow his lawn twice a week – with the loudest petrol mower known to man – and sprays god knows what all over it with a backpack mounted sprayer.
Like, dude. It’s a terraced house with a tiny garden. Why the fuck do you own those things?
His garden is an ecological desert. It’s quite sad.
We need a big pushback from the sort of gardens our parents and grandparents had, with the monoculture lawns and tidy rows of non-native flowers. People like Alan Titchmarsh could really help by being the poster child for this amongst older people, seeing as how people like him have such influence over gardening to this day. We need to see wild gardens become the norm and for manicured gardens to be seen as socially unacceptable.
My local council has done a few months of not cutting the grass/nature maintenance early in the spring/summer to help with insect populations and it’s worked wonderfully, the only problem is how long it takes them to catch up afterwards leads to public pathways being blocked or roads getting overgrown in sections.
I’ll stop mowing when the government bans large scale use of pesticides. PRIKS keep trying to make out like it’s us that’s the problem.
Our garden has always been a mix of leisure and wild, and I usually leave the bottom garden (tiered, as we’re on a slope) wild. We have mature conifers, a massive willow tree and hedges all round, and we’re facing open farmland. the wildlife is usually abundant.
However we got smashed by the storms this year. We lost a mature lilac tree, a jasmine climber got battered to pieces and and an archway with climbing honeysuckle got destroyed. We’ve had to reseed half the lawn as it turned to swamp or moss.
We’ll leave the lower lawn again, although its patchy and mostly moss at the moment, but we’ve lost so much coverage for birds and flowering plants its just depressing.
My neighbour let hers grow and someone moaned to the council about an untidy garden bringing the area down lol. Can’t win.
I would hope that now most Neonicotinoids are banned, we should see an increase in insects and butterflies. Anectdotally, I can say we saw far fewer bees and butterflies last year, but this could have been the shit weather.
I let my back yard grass grow a little over a foot and council told me to cut it
Awww yeah now I have a legit excuse not to mow my lawn!
Wild gardens can look great when done tastefully. Throw in some wild flowers and ferns and it’s beautiful.
I have a neighbour that lets her garden balloon in the summer, she’s practically got a meadow in her garden, and the bees and butterflies seem to love it.
Unfortunately not mowing my grass just boosts cat shit numbers, rendering the whole space unusable.
Thanks! Here’s another excuse to give my wife when she asks me to mow the lawn
I’ve actually noticed that the more we miss mowing the lawn, the less the grass actually grows to impractical lengths.
I work for an ass company that demands they all be short all over the site at all times for aesthetic reasons. This ain’t gonna work
Lol what lawns? Most have been paved over or left to die.
Would like them to stop mowing so we can have some goddam peace and quiet on a weekend. I’m sure the buggers take turns where I live it’s one after the other all day.
Lawns need to die a death. They harm the environment, they’re boring to look at and it feels like such a waste of time having to mow the same desolate patch of grass for your entire life
Is now a bad time to mention I’ve patioed over all of it?
We have loads of different wild flowers all summer. You can still cut your lawn, just do it on a high cut and not every week. It hasn’t stopped the flowers on our lawn. We get violets, daisies, dandelions, buttercups, white clover, field woodrush, plantain, self heal and hawkbit.
I hate cutting my lawn. The grass at the front of house needs cutting. Not cut since last year.
Meanwhile in Canada: Mow every week or you’re getting fined
Councils not using it could be better too. Probably good for public health
I’d love to, but then my landlord gets annoyed that I’m not maintaining the property.
I couldn’t care less about my front garden, but it’s attached to my neighbour’s even though we both live in detached houses. I know they’d kick off if I just left it to its own devices, so it’s just not worth the aggro.
The back garden? Yeah, maybe I’ll let it grow out a bit this year.
As someone with a dog, no. Getting poo out of long grass is no fun.
But we leave the very bottom of the garden wild, with a pond and a couple of buddleia bushes, wild flowers and a log pile. Insects go mad.down there.
Remember when we had Covid lockdown, still had to pay service charges for services we weren’t receiving, public land grew 3ft high with many native species, and the amount of insects rocketed, well, we can’t claim money for services that aren’t being provided anymore so now it’s down the citizenry
I let my garden grow over summer and cur it back in autumn. We get loads of bees, butterflies, birds, squirrels and occasionally foxes. It’s really lovely and I wouldn’t change it for anything.
We planted some wild meadow flowers last year and look forward to seeing what comes out this year!
Britain should rename the Swallowtail butterfly as the Duchess of Sussex butterfly.
Doesn’t help we keep building houses on fields without any green spaces.
Of course numbers dropped last year, the weather was awful and very wet.
I’ve rewilded parts of my garden, and it recent years, not including last year, I’ve seen a significant increase in butterfly, moth and bee numbers. but last year we hardly saw any as it was too wet and cool. Just hoping I’ll see number return this year.
I have a pretty long garden. I leave the edge all the way down so flowers can grow. my front garden has SO MANY bluebells I have to mow around them lol. I have a budler also that butterflys love.
You know what. I’ve got a hunch there’s more to it than people mowing their lawns.
My father’s response to this was, “Stop mowing my grass? Fuck yeah, I’m in”
Tell the council / housing associations to let the communal grass grow beyond 1 inch once in a while.
I think they’d do better saying “Britons urged to stop mowing lawns as it’s a complete ball-ache of a task”. Most of us poor bastards don’t need any warped incentive to leave it be – we just want to be told it’s ok to leave it be.
I actually don’t really want pollinators in my garden as inevitably they mean that next year I’ll have more work to do.
Damned if I’m setting on a gardener at the rates they charge. I sure as shit can’t afford to replace the lawn either with something lower maintenance but I fucking loathe every second I have to spend trudging through it making it temporarily shorter for nobody’s benefit.
The current trend of decking your garden to make it look like a pubs back end is awful. Hopefully free range gardens with local wildflowers come back in.
Absolutely not. My council are doing a good job with that on the road sides
Yea because that will stop all the corporations ripping up the planet and all the chemical fertiliser and pesticides..