“The garden looks wonderfully crazy” were our daughter’s first words when she came home last week. If it is as she says, then it’s the most patiently acquired craziness you can imagine. It started nine years ago when I left one edge of our lawn unmown. In short order it acquired new residents among the hitherto rigidly controlled monoculture.
A patch of marjoram moved in and, in turn, provided accommodation for a gorgeous moth called the small purple and gold, as well as a colony of field grasshoppers. Under the new laissez-faire regime, ragwort and sneezewort began to bloom.
A breakthrough came five years ago with the appearance of spear thistle and hogweed. The latter’s platforms of white-flowered sweetness attract about a dozen hoverfly species daily and a glittering host of pollen beetles. Another incomer, which possesses the gem-like beauty of polished malachite, is the swollen-thighed beetle.
Last autumn I gave the patch another nudge by sowing corncockle and yellow rattle. The rattle is particularly useful because it’s a hemiparasite that further reduces the dominance of grass. It bore new riches this spring with an additional swath of yellow blooms and its own musical orbit of a thousand bumblebees.
They’ve now performed their pollinating duties, and as the yellow rattle seed sets, so the ox-eye daisies and the fox-and-cubs are in their pomp. This month and last I’ve had a rotating cycle of 13 pollen- and nectar-bearing plants.
I would be the first to admit that my patch lacks the true “wildness” of a genuine flower meadow. In truth, sneezewort and fox-and-cubs are non-native introductions, while the corncockle and yellow rattle are here by formal invitation. The lawn edge is also so small as to seem insignificant.
Yet it does have the genuinely unscripted vigour and adventure of a semi-natural habitat. And who knows what will arrive next? It also acquires some of its meaning from the fact that we’ve lost 99% of our flower-rich meadows, yet there are at least 1m acres of lawn in Britain. Maybe the real madness is that we haven’t yet liberated all these potential spaces from the tyranny of the lawnmower.
