Moment of Madness - Filling my lawn with weeds
I grew up running around on a lawn that I think was brilliant but which was technically a complete disaster. It was made up of a lot of moss, yarrow, daisies and I think some clover, all mixed with grass. It was thick and soft under foot. It was full of interest and insects. It has also survived looking remarkably good despite having tents and a marquee erected over it for long periods of time and, as far as I’m aware, never having been reseeded, aerated, rolled, fertilised or scarified.
My parents’ mossy lawn
I can see the appeal of a finely cut lawn to lounge on, but I’m not completely devoted to the idea and I’m beginning to wonder whether this is something I should enjoy on other people’s property but not my own. Maintaining a grass lawn in our tiny, overlooked garden is a nightmare: none of it gets that much sun and all of it gets a lot of traffic. This year we have re-seeded most of it after a winter of abuse during building work and the effort involved in trying to prepare the soil, aerate and then create a good tilth was huge, even over such a small area. Trying to stop little Arthur (aged 2) from stepping on the seed when it is the only access route through the garden (he is not a respecter of stepping stones) is tricky at best and Penelope has rolled over it already. It’s a pain, and we seem to need to repeat the process every couple of years.
And we’re not alone. Maintaining a small lawn is one of the main problems many of my friends seem to have on taking on their first garden in an urban area. I find myself completely unable to advise from experience and can so far only repeat the official advice I garnered from my RHS2 module on lawn care. As far as I can see, when busy, working people struggle to maintain a grassy lawn the obvious option many choose is to switch to paving an area over or, if they have kids, resorting to the dreaded fake turf, which I can’t stand but can completely understand. The challenge of establishing and maintaining a lawn in a small back garden is more than many people can face.
The great tragedy of this is that paving over lawns is disastrous for our urban environment. In the last 20 years, about one-third of the UK’s front gardens have been paved or tarmacked over, amounting to 14,200 hectares or the equivalent of 42 Hyde Parks. This causes big problems with flooding as water cannot be absorbed into the ground, but is also a massive loss of habitat for wildlife which relies on pockets of green, however small, in urban and suburban areas.
Perhaps the best know and least vilified of lawn weeds..
Searching for lawn advice online, I’ve noticed that it falls generally into two categories: how to maintain a pristine lawn and prevent any weeds, or how to allow your lawn to flourish into a gloriously shaggy wild flower meadow. Surely for many of us, neither option is a perfect fit. I definitely allow myself to day dream of ambling through a wildflower meadow in some future enormous garden, but for now it’s really not a practical option beyond leaving a few corners to grow wild (which tends to happen anyway). Anyone who has left their lawn to grow and then allowed a cat or small child to romp on it knows that long grass looks instantly terrible when it encounters any kind of traffic. I can’t help but feel that, in suggesting full length meadow as the only alternative to a manicured lawn, eco advocates have thrown the pollinators out with the grass clippings, and missed a valuable opportunity to instruct those of us in need of a practical and bio-diverse lawn before we give up and opt for Astroturf.
A Japanese moss lawn
In the most recent issue of the RHS’ The Garden magazine, there is a report on the importance of allowing at least some of our lawns to grow longer, saying that lawns cut only once a month attract 10 times as many bees as those cut more frequently. This seems like a reassuringly practical first step, and a lawn cut once a month is far from a meadow, but I would love to have advice on how to develop a short and hard-wearing mixed lawn, packed with ‘weeds’. So far, I have only found a few scattered articles about creating a Japanese style ‘moss lawn’ or a lawn entirely made of clover or Achillea millefolium, and neither of these is what I want. Full moss lawns look wonderful and suit compacted soil and full shade, but whilst they are very soft under little feet, they have no root system and are prone to damage. Achillea is also wonderfully soft and woolly, and has the great benefit of being drought resistant, remaining a verdant green, but I worry it might look patchy at ground level, and from past experience with it in the border I am nervous about it getting out of control. I picture a gentle mix of clover, daisies, yarrow, maybe Irish moss?
Achillea millefolium - verdant, fluffy … and a total nightmare?
Maybe advice on sowing weeds in your lawn doesn’t exist because it’s complete madness. Maybe I’m trying to recreate a childhood memory which my parents would tell me was far from perfect and which will end up being a complete nightmare to manage. I have a feeling I’m soon going to find out.
It feels intimidating to ‘mess up’ an area which we have painstakingly aerated, scarified, improved with sand and so on, but I feel if anyone is going to take the plunge, it might as well be someone with a wild and woolly aesthetic like mine. My plans so far are to gather moss and spread it amongst what is left of the grass in the shadier parts of the garden, and, if I get really brave, to seed Achillea millefolium, clover and daisies amidst the grass in the remaining area. At the very least, I will hopefully be able to report back with a cautionary tale to reinforce why no one is advising such behaviour on the internet.
If anyone more experienced and wiser is reading this and feels they can talk me out of this madness, please do before it’s too late!
