This time last year, residents of the council estate where I live in Greenwich were left in tears after local authority contractors mowed down scores of newly planted purple alliums on our shared lawn just days after they’d bloomed. In minutes, one man with a strimmer had reduced the flowers that my neighbours, many of whom do not have private gardens, had grown over months to mere mulch.
Shamefaced, this year the council sought to make amends by sowing a biodiversity meadow near where the alliums had met their fate. The new wildflowers were doing well – on track to compensate for the previous year’s blunder – until, to the consternation of residents, they were yet again mown down by council contractors. Even the local authorities’ own efforts to improve the biodiversity of the borough proved no match for its trigger-happy lawnmower men.
The problem of relentless local authority mowing is far from unique to Greenwich. All across the country, communities are calling for their councils to do more for biodiversity by mowing less and using fewer plant-killing chemicals. Polling by Friends of the Earth showed that 81% of the public back reduced local authority grass-cutting, and 88% would like their councils to stop spraying harmful pesticides.
But despite public urging, change within many local authorities has been glacial. Cardiff, for example, refused local calls to stop spraying herbicides, and reportedly doused areas where residents were growing tomatoes with weed killer. In West Sussex, a resident’s freedom of information request revealed the council was spending £1.5m on mowing annually, while in Nottingham, even flowers in well signposted “bee-friendly” areas were mown flat last year.
According to the Pesticide Action Network, there are around 40 different plant-killing chemicals regularly used in urban areas in Britain, of which glyphosate is the most prevalent, despite being partially banned in several countries and labelled a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. A Lewisham-based architect took me to see a spot where contractors had sprayed so much of the chemicals on her street that they didn’t just kill flowers, but an entire tree.
The stakes of reducing our mowing and poison use are high. Britain is now one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and is suffering a massive collapse in its native wildlife. Last year’s State of Nature report showed that one in six UK species is now under threat of extinction. Meanwhile, 97% of our flower-rich meadows have been lost since the 1930s and a 60% drop in bees and other flying insects has been recorded over the last two decades.
“That loss of 60% is horrendous” says Mark Schofield of the charity Plantlife, whose annual No Mow May campaign attempts to persuade Britons to adopt less-aggressive green space management practices. Schofield tells me that half our flowering plants have suffered losses in the last 50 years, while there have also been drops in the abundance of one-sixth of British butterflies and a quarter of moths. “I live next to a national nature reserve, and for the love of God, I should be seeing more moths coming in through my window at night,” he laments.
Environmental campaigns often try and convince us that individual choices alone can solve systemic problems. It is true that no amount of reusable coffee cups will compensate for something as vast and systemic as the billions of pounds of government subsidies flowing into aviation. But No Mow May can make a meaningful difference to biodiversity, working at the level of both individual households and local authorities.
At around 640,000 hectares, 4.9% of England is domestic gardens. Add another 180,000 or so hectares of road verges and 73,600 hectares of publicly accessible urban green spaces, and that’s an area almost 10 times the size of all our nature reserves combined. Reducing mowing on just a quarter of this land would create a biodiversity zone larger than several whole counties put together.
Though local lawnmower wars rage on, encouragingly, some authorities are starting to take ambitious action. Wiltshire council, for example, is in the process of moving to less frequent mowing, while Cambridge city council has made big steps towards going pesticide-free. Hackney, which used to employ contractors to spray pesticides from quad bikes, has now phased down spraying by 80%, and the number of local authorities officially registered with the No Mow May campaign has jumped from around 30 last year to 55.
“Every council has a role to play,” says Ryan Jude, a Labour councillor in Westminster, who was elected in 2022 and is responsible for the newly created brief of Climate, Ecology and Culture. “Since coming in, we’ve created a cabinet member and a deputy cabinet member for climate.” Appointing a designated champion for environmental issues has made a significant impact, and one that other local authorities could learn from. In a ranking of councils’ climate actions published in October, Westminster came out top of all single-tier authorities in the UK for their sustainability leadership including banning use of glyphosate on their land and reducing unnecessary mowing.
Systemic problems need systemic solutions. As a campaign to persuade individual homeowners to change how they garden, No Mow May is a charming but inherently limited initiative. However, as a tool to persuade not just individuals but public authorities to rethink their out-of-date intensive mowing and poison-spraying regimes, it can make a real impact on nature recovery in the UK.
Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
