As if there were any shortage of global rifts, a new turf war is escalating: the politics of grass. Where once “watching grass grow” was the epitome of dullness, it’s now in some quarters a crime against the planet, in others a sacred taonga under barbarous attack.
What began as a simple debate between those who value the biodiversity benefits of a little lenience on weeds and those who still cherish velveteen stripes and death to dandelions has metastasised.
Now, the opponents are subdividing for much fiercer scraps. Accidental chief provocateur in Britain, where the modern verdant sward was pioneered, is BBC gardening presenter Monty Don, who’s about to unveil his first Chelsea Flower Show exhibit: a dog-friendly garden with a “shaggy” lawn – as in grass left long enough to host buttercups, daisies, clover and all the other non-trimmings of which lawn purists despair.
This mildest of capitulations to the rewilding movement has proved incendiary. Gardeners’ forums and online comment threads, where traditional gardeners still hyperventilate at the popularity of the “no-mow” and “good weeds” movement, find a shaggy lawn even more provoking. Chelsea, they argue, is for well-tended plants in the pink of health set in thoughtful or novel layouts. Where exactly does a purposely scruffy lawn fit into this, let alone with added dog poo? Why not install a sagging old sofa and a stripped car chassis for the full effect, say the especially bitter.
Battling this are militantly green gardeners, who disdainfully regard letting the lawn go just a little bit wild as akin to claiming to be just a little bit homicidal. Lawns, they argue, deprive wildlife of food and forage and add to the planet’s damaging emissions balance.
Don regards rewilding as “patronising nonsense”, bridling at what he sees as the browbeating of home gardeners into effectively giving up gardening. Though his garden welcomes wafty weeds like cow parsley and seasonal wildflowers, he resists the idea that gardens be allowed to revert to some sort of natural state.
But his gentle advocacy against lawn fanaticism continues to enrage traditionalists, even while green fundamentalists deplore his lawn tolerance.
In the great sweep of history, lawn maintenance is a modern conceit and has always been a luxury. Invented for stately homes, the perfect sward slowly caught on in the developed world, eventually becoming available to humble householders, but only in relatively wealthy societies. Poorer communities lucky enough to have a bit of land grazed stock or grew edibles on it. The Roundup and Masport phase was a very modern evolution, and even now, not every developed country has a pervasive lawn culture.
British and Irish employers of immigrant gardeners, even from other European countries, can find it hard to convey the lawn-care ethic. Even basics like removing the clippings and mowing evenly strike many workers as incomprehensible faff.
Conversely, there remains a subtribe for whom lawn maintenance is high art. A suggestion that, say, seasonal scarifying – scratching the lawn vigorously with a rake to remove dead matter – is not absolutely necessary can provoke harsh words. Philistines who gloat about the superiority of concrete and AstroTurf risk being scarified themselves.
British gardening luminary Alan Titchmarsh has even written to the House of Lords warning that rewilding threatens the survival of botanical heritage.
In the interests of unity, his plea suggests a way forward. All gardening subtribes have a common foe – bully plants that decimate even thriving habitats. Whether your moral compass is reverently to keep off the grass or greenly to keep the grass off, the pitilessly self-seeking likes of convolvulus, clematis vitalba, knotweed and pine can invade, annex, disrupt and destroy.
Can we not all at least agree that they should be made to sod off?
