No Mow May

[gurnemanz]

Reviving this one now that Monty has lent support to non-mowers amongst us.

https://news.sky.com/story/dont-cut-your-grass-just-let-it-grow-monty-don-says-12240538

I think I'm going try mowing less frequently and use only the longest grass setting and see how it goes.

[gradus]

I don't recall, from his TV shows, that Monty Don's garden possesses much grass at all and certainly not a lawn so I assume his remarks are aimed at telling us what to do. Nuts to that.

[oddoneout]

I don't recall, from his TV shows, that Monty Don's garden possesses much grass at all and certainly not a lawn so I assume his remarks are aimed at telling us what to do. Nuts to that.

Funny you should say that as I've just been reading the March GW magazine (courtesy of the free e-library service) which has a plan of his patch and it is indeed all 'gardened'. The only grass is the paths and joining strips between sections. I remember seeing him turning some wide grass strips beside a path into a linear wildflower 'meadow' on TV - last year I think?

[Bryn]

My next-door neighbour insists on mowing my part of the contiguous front lawn when he does his, larger, section.* However, the back garden has been left untouched so far this year. Lots of colour now from plants I did not even know were there. Best of all, and to relate to the topic, May is out, i.e. my hawthorn burst into blossom a few days ago. Having heavily pruned it during the winter, it now offers less entanglement with the close-by non-fastigiate hornbeam.

* When we had an extension built over the garage, the local council official insisted (quite wrongly, it turns out) that we had to pave over about half the front lawn in order to provide an unneeded extra parking space. Otherwise, we would not be granted planning permission.

[vinteuil]

Lots of colour now from plants I did not even know were there...

... when I bought this house, for the first couple of years I did nothing to the 'garden' (by which I mean 'tiny London back yard'. But garden, yard, and paradise have shared etymological roots)

Friends commented (snarkily enough ) on the number of 'interesting weeds' that seemed to be coming up in the various earth or other patches.

I declared that this was to be a panspermic garden - what arrived and grew wd be allowed to do so, and welcomed.

A philosophy that didn't survive more than a couple of years...


.

[Bryn]

... when I bought this house, for the first couple of years I did nothing to the 'garden' (by which I mean 'tiny London back yard'. But garden, yard, and paradise have shared etymological roots)

Friends commented (snarkily enough ) on the number of 'interesting weeds' that seemed to be coming up in the various earth or other patches.

I declared that this was to be a panspermic garden - what arrived and grew wd be allowed to do so, and welcomed.

A philosophy that didn't survive more than a couple of years...


.

'Managed succession' is my espoused aim.

[Serial_Apologist]

My next-door neighbour insists on mowing my part of the contiguous front lawn when he does his, larger, section.* However, the back garden has been left untouched so far this year. Lots of colour now from plants I did not even know were there. Best of all, and to relate to the topic, May is out, i.e. my hawthorn burst into blossom a few days ago. Having heavily pruned it during the winter, it now offers less entanglement with the close-by non-fastigiate hornbeam.

* When we had an extension built over the garage, the local council official insisted (quite wrongly, it turns out) that we had to pave over about half the front lawn in order to provide an unneeded extra parking space. Otherwise, we would not be granted planning permission.

But did you comply? I would have thought that, with all the warnings about runoff from paved or concreted driveways, the council would now be on the wrong side.

[Bryn]

But did you comply? I would have thought that, with all the warnings about runoff from paved or concreted driveways, the council would now be on the wrong side.

At the time, it was my late mother's house and she allowed the official to bamboozle her. At least I can offer neighbours somewhere to park off-road and help keep the road a little more clear for the local buses, etc. As is all too often the case, the road is a real slalom-course for larger vehicles. Come Royal Ascot, stretch limo drivers sometimes make the mistake of trying to use it as a rat-run and get stuck.

[Serial_Apologist]

'Managed succession' is my espoused aim.

I.e. the correct definition of karma: or the necessity to carry on interfering in the "natural" course of events since that course has already been interfered with. Here was have a large mature hornbeam over-shading a small area of the garden when grass hardly grows: the only things that do are winter-flowering cyclamen planted many years ago by my predecessor. That is, with the area in question continuing to be mown regardless until this year, when the gardener has been letting the grass lawn areas grow longer than in the past - as a consequence of which we have been delighted to discover that a few clumps of bluebells have come into bloom, and that they are native bluebells, no question about that. In addition are groups of cow parsley. I am the designated Garden Liaison Officer for the whole block, and unless complaints arise from this decision to leave well alone until the cow parsley is over, I shall probably continue this practice for what is in any case a tatty looking triangle of compacted ground used by residents and tenants taking the longer route from the clothes drying precinct but otherwise unnoticed apart from by birds, foxes, squirrels, probably rats, the two dogs living in the block, and the local feline community.

[vinteuil]

I.e. the correct definition of karma: or the necessity to carry on interfering in the "natural" course of events since that course has already been interfered with...

... as Shakspere has it in The Winter's Tale [IV,iv]

(Polixenes) -

...."Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature... "

[gurnemanz]

... as Shakspere has it in The Winter's Tale [IV,iv]

(Polixenes) -

...."Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature... "

Polixenes seems to be saying that you can interfere with nature and in so doing even improve it but the interfering is itself still nature at work. With not total consistency he then goes on to object to his son Florizel , the 'gentler scion' presumably, interbreeding with the child of nature Perdita, the 'wildest stock', who refuses to improve her natural beauty by wearing make-up and won't tolerate hybrid flowers. The message of the play is surely that it works the other way, in that nature heals the ills of civilisation and Leontes' polluted court can be purified.

The upshot of this is that whatever I do to my lawn is OK.

[gradus]

There seem to be many more cowslips this year, great swathes of them in places where none seemed to grow before, I don't think its the avoidance of mowing as they are in places that are never mown. Anyone else noticed this?

[Serial_Apologist]

Polixenes seems to be saying that you can interfere with nature and in so doing even improve it but the interfering is itself still nature at work. With not total consistency he then goes on to object to his son Florizel , the 'gentler scion' presumably, interbreeding with the child of nature Perdita, the 'wildest stock', who refuses to improve her natural beauty by wearing make-up and won't tolerate hybrid flowers. The message of the play is surely that it works the other way, in that nature heals the ills of civilisation and Leontes' polluted court can be purified.

The upshot of this is that whatever I do to my lawn is OK.

I am sure it is, gurney.

The upshot of what I learned on the horticultural degree course I took in 1995-7 benefitted me personally in having read Alan Watts's several books on Taoism and Buddhism long beforehand, and found the science of Ecology confirmatory of much that seemed to have been clear to these ancient spiritual belief systems and practices: to whit, of "nature" consisting in discernible patterns of interconnecting, mutually self-supporting, self-balancing life systems. "Succession" describes the mutual processes of growth and decay seen as essential to maintaining the overall balance of the system as a whole - growth and decay being terms applicable to the entire ecosphere, including weather systems as well as regulating the inter-dependence and sustainability of life forms.

For Bryn's more than adequate term "managed succession" the lecturer offered "plagioclimax management", denoting the timing of any intervention at the human level aimed at optimising the biodiversity of the whole for the benefit of the whole which included ourselves. Tacit was the idea that without "us" - or for that matter the existence of an interventionist deity - the system would have maintained its own inbuilt balances; our presence dictated that once interference in the natural evolution of life had upset these balances, compensatory restorative measures would always be needed to maintain a humanly inhabitable planet. Where, (for me), the Hindu term karma might be said to apply here, consists in acceptance of the principle, and of the devising of living and working practices in line with its ways of operation as understood: "understood" being the operative word, given that for centuries such attitudes were not seen or treated as acceptable to the "western mindset", with its collective belief - in part ascribable to religious teaching - that human life could be run on an altogether different plane, one which treated the natural world as a mere source for control, exploitation and the non-accountable material over-privileging of society's ruling orders.

To be fair, critics have in part rightly accused Marxism of being part of the problem, inasmuch that the Bolsheviks paying minimal heed to the principles governing sustainable growth gave the green light to the heavy industrialisation of the Soviet Union under Stalin intended to catch up with two hundred years of "progress" by the capitalist West. In some ways Mao got it "right" by inverting urban prioritisation over the agrarian, except for the rest of the narrative... I would argue nevetheless that there was nothing (to my admittedly rather limited reading) intrinsic to Marxism that preordained the future progress of humankind to environmentally destructive ends; indeed when Marx wrote about the natural world as our common inheritance and resource base it was seeing it as being in the future control of rational enlightened, scientifically educated people. Neither he, nor the artists, architects and poets of the Russian Revolution fated for either execution or the labour camps could have predicted the re-shaping of living and of values by consumerism; ideologically it is both undoing the gaps in OUR theory before being in any ethical or moral position to cope with the latter's consequences that any new post-capitalist political direction has, a priori, to deal with.

[mikealdren]

Funny you should say that as I've just been reading the March GW magazine (courtesy of the free e-library service) which has a plan of his patch and it is indeed all 'gardened'. The only grass is the paths and joining strips between sections. I remember seeing him turning some wide grass strips beside a path into a linear wildflower 'meadow' on TV - last year I think?

Monty has more time for gardening than we do, lawns are relatively low maintenance compared with Long Meadow.

[ardcarp]

There seem to be many more cowslips this year, great swathes of them in places where none seemed to grow before, I don't think its the avoidance of mowing as they are in places that are never mown. Anyone else noticed this?

We are in a more primrose area than cowslip (the latter preferring chalky soils). But primroses too have been more abundant this year than I ever remember them.