Have you heard of ‘no mow May’? This month councils are asking zealous gardeners to do the impossible — sit back and watch nettles and dandelions take over their lawns. Verges too. The purpose of this is to ‘create ecological corridors’ for animals and ‘havens’ for bees — all very sensible — but I do feel for the sort of people who plan their year in the garden like a military operation, and who must now watch, forehead veins throbbing, while the enemy advances. Gardening is meant to be therapeutic: let’s hope these gardeners can call on reserves of mindfulness practice.
I worry, too, for those who have got caught in the rapid switch-up of gardening trends. Just a few years ago, back in 2014, councils introduced laws that would fine people who failed to adequately spruce up their lawns — in Doncaster, people were sternly advised to prune all overgrown shrubs so that they were ‘in keeping with the neighbourhood’, and various councils issued CPNs to stop people feeding birds. (One even imposed a notice telling people not to use their gardens for crying in).
The call for more thistles and dandelions is a true upending of the hierarchy: the neighbour with nettles sprouting through the paving stones is now the responsible citizen — they are ‘liberating polinators’ and creating a ‘thriving natural habitat for local wildlife’. It is the avid mower, meanwhile, possibly stifling their sobs, who has become a local nuisance: playing their part in the destruction of the country’s wildflower meadows and getting on the wrong side of David Attenborough, who is keen for gardens to become more ecologically sound.
The trend goes further. This is also the month of the Chelsea Flower show, in which we are told to expect a third of show gardens to feature weeds. The show is trying to rebrand weeds altogether: in fact, the term is now derogatory, it is proper to refer to thistles, brambles and the like as ‘resilient plants’. “There is a lot of stigma around the word ‘weed’,” Tom Massey at the Royal Entomological Society told reporters. Wasps, apparently, are in too.
Last year a garden with gnawed wood (by beavers), a rusty corrugated iron shed, ‘native grasses’ and lots of dead foliage won the show. This year, perhaps, it will be an upturned shopping trolley with nettles artfully growing through, or maybe a mouldy collection of gardening tools, forgotten behind the shed and now fully “repurposed by nature”.
I’m being too critical: the rewilding trend in gardens and flower shows is of course a worthy one. Wild, natural land is key to environmental recovery — but you wonder just how much a few dandelioned London back gardens are really helping, when outside cities there is so much environmental destruction. Councils asking us grow our own nettles reminds me of scrap metal collection during the Second World War — when people were asked, fruitlessly, to donate railings and pots to the war effort. It let them feel they were helping, but did essentially nothing.
While the aesthetic trend for rewinding flourishes, rewilding itself — a project that can do so much for the environment — has been cut back on a huge scale. According to the Government’s Climate Change Committee, allowing forests to sprout on grassland in England would soak up vast amounts of carbon — increasing it by 25 tonnes per hectare, on average. Yet the Government has slashed the ‘landscape recovery’ budget from £800m to just £50m, thus basically abandoning the nature recovery project which it said was ‘essential to achieve our environmental ambitions’. While people ‘rewild’ their front lawns, the incentives for farmers to keep rivers clean and hedgerows thriving have melted away. As George Eustace wrote in a letter to farmers before a by-election last year: “We’ve binned the three-crop rule, we’ve scrapped the greening requirements … we’ve delayed changes to the use of urea by at least a year … a vote for the Conservatives will be a vote to support farming.”
This quiet U-turn was framed as support for farmers — and rewilding as an indulgent middle-class idea — but it risks intensifying the sort of farming that has led to poisoned rivers, bleached soils, flooding and blasted hedgerows. Support for farmers does not have to mean licence to destroy. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. If rewilding is now on trend, so much the better. But let’s actually do some.
