Tasmanian garden wins prize for world’s ugliest lawn

Kathleen Murray, who won the world’s ugliest lawn competition, wears her prize T-shirt. She said people can feel pressured by neighbours into keeping their lawns well-watered Photograph: Handout

It is not so much a lawn as a moonscape: pitted craters dug by bandicoots, exhausted tufts of withered yellow grass plucked by wallabies and pitiful plants shrivelled brown under the Australian sunshine.

But Kathleen Murray is the proud winner of the first World’s Ugliest Lawn competition after the Swedish contest to encourage water-saving, environmentally-friendly gardening went global.