Tag Archives: lawn management

Lawless lawns

First published in the September 2022 issue of Woman magazine

“… an ecologically dead status symbol.” Douglas W. Tallamy

Let’s talk about lawns.

I remember doing a profile on a gardening couple who took great pride in their lawn. “Visitors say they just want to take their shoes off and luxuriate in the grass,” declared the lawn man of the pair. I had taken my gardening and life partner, Mark, along for moral support and as soon as we were safely in the car and departing, he expostulated, “People want to let their bare skin touch that?”

We both knew what sort of chemical arsenal was used to achieve a lawn that looked like green velvet and we would not be wanting our skin touching it. It is a value that originates from American suburbia – all those perfect street frontages – and I am not sure that is of merit.  

There is the perfect lawn and then there is mown grass. It is many years since Mark declared that he would not routinely spray the lawn to try and keep it to the chosen grass varieties that give a handsome sward. As long as it was small-leafed, green and able to be mown, that was fine.  I notice that it is me, not him, who goes around on my hands and knees rooting out the flat weeds but the excessive daisies, dandelions and docks worry me more than him.

I would make an exception if we had small children in our lives. I might then agitate for spraying Onehunga weed, or prickle weed as it is often called. It makes going barefooted unpleasant. If you are going to resort to spraying it, you need to understand that it germinates in winter, grows madly all spring and, when the prickles appear in summer, it has already set its seed and the plant will die so there is no point at all in spraying at that time. You need to spray in spring when it is in full growth to break the seeding cycle and you will need to do it for several years as dormant seeds will keep germinating.

If you are not keen on spraying, you can let the grass grow long in the spring flush which will force the Onehunga weed to grow taller to reach the light. Then set the mower level lower than usual and you will be cutting off most of the Onehunga weed before it has a chance to flower and seed.

Our front lawn, seen here in autumn, is a fairly major feature and I wasn’t sure about letting it grow wild.

What about not mowing at all? It is a controversial position to take in an urban setting. We recently  let our front lawn grow over summer and there is no doubt it is alive with bees and butterflies when in flower. The Californian quail love it too with its abundance of seed. Our main interlopers are clover, lotus major and self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) which means it flowers pink, white, yellow and blue. Mark refers to it as a low meadow.

Mowing the perimeter of the lawn and paths gave instant form to what would otherwise look unkempt. It would look better had we raked the paths or collected the clippings as well. The mulcher mower was not equal to the sheer volume of grass to be cut down on this occasion.

Because our front lawn is quite a major statement, it worried me when it looked …. well… rank and unloved in the early stages. I had a stroke of genius, drawing on what I had seen overseas, and asked for a double width to be mown around the perimeter and our most used paths across the lawn to be mown, again a generous two mower widths wide. It made all the difference visually and transformed it from unmown lawn to managed meadow. We kept it that way until the flowering was finished and then cut it all down again.

Our ‘low meadow’ in full flower

On the topic of mowing, get yourself a mulcher mower that chomps up the clippings to a fine tilth that is absorbed back into the grass. It means you don’t ever need to feed your lawn with nitrogen fertiliser again and it makes mowing faster without faffing around with lawn clippings which are the bane of landfill. The only reason lawns need fertilising is because constant mowing and collecting the clippings strips out any goodness and doesn’t allow for a natural cycle of replenishment. We haven’t fed our lawns for years, maybe even decades, but they remain green, well-covered and healthy simply because we use a mulcher mower.

If you choose to spray your lawn, then at least educate yourself as to what the active ingredients are and choose accordingly. There are more environmentally friendly options coming available but lawn sprays in the past – some of which will still be in garden sheds around the country and some may still be available – were a toxic brew.

Contrary to widespread opinion in NZ, this is not a wildflower meadow. It is a pretty sowing of annuals in a casual style and is not an easy-care alternative to lawn.

Proper meadows and wildflowers are a whole different topic. When wildflowers are mentioned, most people think of wildflower seed mixes – the ones that are soldier poppies, cornflowers, cosmos, daisies white and daisies yellow and a whole lot more. Pretty though they can be at their peak, they are neither meadow nor wildflower, or certainly not our wildflowers. Essentially it is gardening with annuals and such plantings are generally short-lived and need quite a bit of work to stop them deteriorating to a flattened, weedy mess. There are alternative approaches but they are not an easy answer and take a much higher level of gardening skill than a simple lawn requires.

What does a lawn achieve? If you are the sort of family who gets out for wholesome games in the garden, be it backyard cricket, rugby, badminton or even croquet, then yes, the lawn provides a suitable recreational space. Most of us persist with lawns long past the time when we have children frolicking outdoors, assuming they ever did.

Mondo grass creates a green breathing space that is every bit as effective as mown grass.  

I came to the conclusion that there are two reasons for lawns. The first is practical; they are lower maintenance than most styles of garden. The second reason is aesthetic; an expanse of mown grass gives a breathing space in a garden and can frame the more detailed, decorative areas. The mistake is to think that you can only get that breathing space with a lawn. There are other ways and it doesn’t have to be the courtyard approach of paving or decking. I remember Gil Hanly’s garden in Auckland where she created a simple breathing space with green mondo grass beneath palm trees. It would have been lower maintenance than mown grass and, in a highly detailed garden with lots of colour, it gave that space to draw breath and relax.  

In the end, lawns are on a spectrum. At the extreme end are the lawn fanatics who will de-thatch, aerate (because they have killed off the earthworms), core, oversow, irrigate, use sprays frequently, fertilise extensively and mow every day or every second day to maintain a perfect velvet monoculture comparable to a bowling green. I see this as an environmental travesty and a political statement from people who are proudly declaring total control and supremacy over nature by every means in their chemical and mechanical arsenals.

At the other end of the scale are those who either dispense with lawns entirely or simply give up mowing. There is a lot of room to move in between those two extremes where most of us can find a level which sits better with us in environmental, aesthetic and practical terms.

There is a different charm to a casual seating arrangement in long grass rather than on mown lawn although my practical side says this probably works better in a drier climate.

We just need to stop thinking of one end as admirable and aspirational and the other end as disgraceful and lazy. Nature would prefer it if more of us were inclined to land on the laissez faire end of the spectrum.

“Over three-quarters of all garden chemicals sold in Britain are for the improvement of our lawns.”             The Curious Gardener’s Almanac by Niall Edworthy (2006)

Once was mown lawn at RHS Rosemoor. English friends tell me that the sight of mown grass in public parks and gardens is increasingly rare

Not quite lawn-free but leaning more to meadows

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One of the advantages of having our garden closed to the public for a year or two, or maybe more, is the freedom to experiment. And experimenting we are with lawns – or mown green areas may be a more accurate description. We stopped mowing half our park at the end of last winter, choosing instead to keep to a mown track meandering through, so it is possible to walk without getting wet feet.

We have been talking about lawns and grass for years here. Lawns are arguably the most environmentally unfriendly gardening practice of all. Yet there is considerable value placed on the perfect lawn and some people take great pride in achieving this. Perfection is measured against the bowling green which has no connection whatever to the home garden, let alone to nature.

I have never forgotten taking Mark along when I was doing an interview for a commissioned garden story. The owners were very proud of their lush, green sward and claimed that garden visitors often said they wanted to take their shoes off and walk barefoot or roll on it. I saw Mark throw me a telling glance and later he expostulated: “You want to let your bare skin touch that?’ For we both knew that sort of lawn perfection is only achievable by regular spraying with a fair range of chemicals, as well as fertiliser application and the usual frequent mowing, scarifying and over sowing that is required to keep it in such an artificial state.

The perfect lawn is a triumph of man or woman over nature, a dominance achieved at considerable cost to the environment and no small financial cost. There are all sorts of concerns around the western world about run-off from domestic lawns and frankly, when your lawn clippings are too toxic to put into the compost without risking your tomatoes and other crops for the next six months, there is a problem. Some folk will even kill off the worms with a residual spray in the quest for lawn perfection.

Mama Quail and two little feathered bumble bees of babies feeding on the lawn

Mama Quail and two little feathered bumble bees of babies feeding on the lawn

Mark is keen to have grass expanses with at least one flowering a year to feed the bees and other insect life. An added bonus has been unexpected. We made a decision a few years ago not to replace our cat, even though I adore fluffy felines. As a result, the Californian quail population has been steadily increasing and these lovely birds are a delight, foraging across the house lawns for seed. We might feel differently about a flowering lawn if we had small people in our lives running around bare footed, but in their absence, there is no need to worry about the bees.

We use a mulcher mower so the clippings are returned to the grass and this has eliminated any need to feed the lawn. Come early November, we let the grass grow long before cutting because then the dreaded Onehunga weed gets stretched and cut off before it can set its prickles. We do a certain amount of hand weeding to keep the flat weeds and undesirable grasses at bay in the house lawns. Beyond that, as long as it is fine or small leaved and cuts neatly, it is allowed to stay. Our lawns are more mixed colony environments than controlled grass species. We still mow regularly, but we are stretching out the intervals between mowing because we have become very aware of how dependent we now are on the motorised gardening aids and just how much fuel we have to buy to keep the mower, strimmer, chain saw and leaf blower running.

One of the delightful gardening books on my shelf is early Alan Titchmarsh, the Yorkshire gardener who is now a star TV presenter in the UK. Back in 1984, he wrote about The Lawn:
“Avant-gardeners do not have lawns; they have grass….The ‘bowling green’ lawn is a feature that belongs in front of council houses where it is surrounded by borders of lobelia, alyssum, French marigolds and salvias with standard fuchsias used as ‘dot plants’.

The avant-gardener’s grass is intermingled with daisies, plantains, buttercups… and plenty of moss (usually at least of 50% of the total coverage). This is a state of affairs to be encouraged. The grass is mown (avoiding a striped effect at all costs)…” (Avant-Gardening, a guide to one-upmanshop in the garden).

We have extensive areas of grass but have already decided that the front lawn should remain mown lawn rather than mixed meadow

We have extensive areas of grass but have already decided that the front lawn should remain mown lawn rather than mixed meadow

I admit we own the Rolls Royce of lawnmowers. It cost more than our car to buy

I admit we own the Rolls Royce of lawnmowers. It cost more than our car to buy

It does not appear that we have moved a long way since 1984 avant-garde thinking. If you are wondering what half our park looks like after six months without cutting the grass, I can report that the buttercup and self heal are thriving. To a critical eye it probably looks better in the shady areas than in the full sun but the mown strip is indeed like a path through a meadow and that is the effect we now want. We have worked out that we want the lawns immediately around the house more tightly maintained but, even in a large garden, we can achieve that without chemical intervention and top-up feeding. We see that as far more sustainable and environmentally friendly than the suburban value of an immaculate lawn.

First published in the June issue of the New Zealand Gardener and repinted here with their permission.

In the Garden this Fortnight: January 26, 2012

A fortnightly series first published in the Weekend Gardener and reproduced here with their permission.

The dreaded Onehunga weed needs active management

The dreaded Onehunga weed needs active management

Onehunga weed is that innocent looking but prickly interloper to the lawn which makes walking in bare feet a misery. It is an annual weed and the prickles are part of its seed setting cycle. We had an invasion of it in some areas and rather than spraying, we tried scalping the lawn just before Christmas. By scalping, I mean cutting on a very low level and removing all the clippings to the compost heap. We normally mulch the clippings back in to the lawn. The lawn looked patchy for the next few weeks but the Onehunga weed was gone – including the new crop of seed heads. There is a risk element to this approach. Had we then struck a prolonged period of high temperatures and sun, we would have had to have started watering the lawn or watched a dust bowl develop. Scalping a lawn in early to mid summer is not usually recommended. As it happened, we had plenty of torrential rain to green up the lawn again.

You can spray for Onehunga weed (though you need to do it earlier in the season before the plants flower and set prickles) but we are increasingly reluctant to use lawn sprays, leaning to the view that maintaining one’s lawn chemically is getting close to environmental vandalism. Recent research from Massey has found a new strain of Onehunga weed which is resistant to the usual lawn sprays -another warning, perhaps, about gardening strategies that depend on chemical intervention. The weed generally germinates in autumn and grows through winter to flower and die in summer. If you have a lush, healthy lawn, it will find it harder to get going in competition with established grasses. Lifting the mower a notch or two higher can help keep a lawn in better condition (a scalped or shaved lawn is never a healthy lawn) and we are big advocates of using a mulcher mower, thereby avoiding having to feed the lawn. Where we need to over sow or renovate areas, we use homemade compost rather than proprietary fertiliser. Our lawns don’t look like bowling greens but they are generally healthy and green.

Onehunga weed is shallow rooted so if you only have a small area of grass, you can hand weed it. It is always better to get in early before it spreads – which it will do at alarming speed if you ignore it.

This one is auratum Flossie - all the lilies are opening now
This one is auratum Flossie – all the lilies are opening now

Top tasks:
1) An emergency staking round on some of the top heavy auratum lilies. We grow a lot of these for summer fragrance and blooms. Because they are garden plants and not show blooms, we support the flower heads on neighbouring plants where possible, but some just have to be staked. Home harvested, fresh green bamboo stakes are less visually intrusive than bought bamboos stakes. We shun plastic stakes but will use rusty old steel on occasion.

2) The rose garden is looking tired. I have major plans for a renovation of this area in winter but will start by lifting and dividing some of the stronger perennials, potting them to planter bags and keeping them out of sight and under irrigation while they recover. It takes many more plants than anyone ever expects to furnish a garden which has been gutted out. I need to start now to have sufficient plants to do a major rework and replant in winter.

Of matters related to social class and social conscience

Cardoon - the next trendy crop for basil sophisticates?

Cardoon - the next trendy crop for basil sophisticates?

I have fun with Twitter, the social networking stream where you have be very brief and succinct and most interaction takes place with strangers. Not that gardening tweeps (the lingo says a participant is a tweep, not a twit or twitterer) are generally inspiring, witty or memorable. But Twitter delivered me two gems this week of a horticultural bent.

The first tweet linked me through to a column from the Dominion Post discussing baby names – which has nothing whatever to do with gardening unless you draw the long bow and comment on the growing popularity of flower names such as Lily and Poppy. Goodness, maybe Daphne is due for a recall. Mark suggested when our daughters were born that we could go for Astelia or Aciphylla – the latter being a spiky native plant and his favoured option, even more so if we chose the botanical reference Dieffenbachii as the poor wee mite’s middle name. But I digress. That column by Dave Armstrong referred to the “basil growing classes”. I laughed out loud. As a definition of middle class, urban, somewhat leftwing New Zealand, the basil growing classes seemed wonderfully apt. There is a limit to how versatile basil is and there is only so much pesto one can eat. Salads of sweet tomatoes, sliced fresh mozzarella and basil leaves are equally delightful but the price of mozzarella (the white stuff cocooned in water, not the nasty long life stuff) limits how often this appears in our household. I can remember that there was indeed Life Before Basil in this country – a time when only those who had backpacked through Italy had been introduced to the seductive fragrance of freshly picked basil leaves. Now it is a defining herb of the middle classes here and to grow your own makes you trendier.

Cardoon flowers are showier than basil flowers

Cardoon flowers are showier than basil flowers

So, if your children bear names like Oliver, Samuel and Amelia, you probably drive an urban SUV but your husband bikes to work, you have tomatoes in a grow bag, a worm farm and pots of basil growing, consider yourself one of the basil growing social class. In which case I have a hot tip – cardoon is my prediction for the new basil. It is sufficiently obscure to be interesting. It is extremely decorative in the garden. It is edible. We have eaten it. To be honest, we weren’t blown away by it (not like Florence fennel) but it is fine. In case you want to know more, instructions for growing it are below.

But I was ever so slightly crushed this week when Mark asked me to Google burdock. He was debating about what to do with the small plants he had growing after being enticed to buy seed from Kings Seed Catalogue. In fact we decided on balance that burdock is probably not worth the garden space, has dangerous weed potential, does not sound particularly tasty at all and has a very low yield to space required. But there, amongst the burdock information was the one line: Burdock: peeled leaf stalks are parboiled and used as a substitute for cardoon.

Wow. Some have never even heard of cardoon. Some don’t know that cardoon is edible. Some are still at the experimental stage of determining how edible it is. It is not yet showing up in any cookbooks I have seen, even though I receive review copies of many of the latest publications. But it is already such a staple in some people’s diets that they have found a substitute for it? I am amazed. My advice is to not delay if you wish to catch the wave of cardoon as a fashion crop. I will try and be earlier with my next prediction.

The second tweet was not so much as a source of amusement as vindicating a stance we have been taking here for some time. An American tweep, @InkandPenstemon, posted the comment: “The static monoculture of a lawn is never more unattractive than when it is exposed in the winter.”

We prefer to talk about grass rather than lawns these days

We prefer to talk about grass rather than lawns these days

It has felt a little lonely at times, standing on our high horse bemoaning the obsession with the perfect lawn. At last I am seeing more talk challenging the high value we place on completely unsustainable and environmentally unfriendly lawn maintenance. There is a column in the latest NZ Gardener by Steve Wratten on this very topic. The author just happens to be Professor of Ecology at Lincoln University. He goes further than we do in that he eschews the motor mower in favour of an electric mower. I will own up to the fact that we use a pretty damn fancy lawnmower and we use it extensively. Because we have an open garden, there are standards we feel obliged to maintain and mowing large areas of grass is part of that. Perhaps we could offset that against the fact that our car usually gets to leave the garage only once or twice a week?

I make no apology for continuing a public crusade. We should not be embracing gardening values which are environmentally damaging and the worst one of all is the perfect lawn. A smooth monoculture of a single species of grass is a completely unnatural state of affairs which can only be maintained with chemical intervention. If you insist on killing off the earthworms as well (as some do to avoid the surface being pocked by worm casts and tilled by birds), your crimes against nature are compounded exponentially. It is time we questioned this particular gardening value.

The irony is that it is probably the very same basil growing classes who are likely to wise up to this situation and act upon it in the first wave of concern. Clearly there is a lot to be said for basil as a defining social measure.

Earlier articles on lawn care here include “What does your lawn say about you?” from 2011 and “The lawn as a political statement” from 2006.

First published in the Waikato Times and reprinted here with their permission.