How was your 'No mow May'?

From Bowling Green to Wildflower Meadow — What Five Years of Doing Less Has Taught Us

When we moved to our home in Cumbria five years ago, the lawn was a bowling green. Mown weekly, perfectly level, uniformly green. The kind of lawn that takes real effort to maintain — yet supports almost nothing. Wind the clock back many years and that was probably the type of lawn that I would have gone for and that probably applies to most of us right?

We didn't set out to change it dramatically. We just started doing less. For two reasons, 1 - to encourage more wildlife and 2 - because we have young children and busy lives, so who has time to mow lawns for hours? Almost immediately, we started to see a difference. We’d always done this at our previous house as we had mining bees in the lawn that emerged every May. They were no bother, the kids didn’t get stung and they were a delight to live alongside. So we started to realise that even with young children, we could function perfectly well with longer grass and just a few areas mown shorter.

Today, we mow a few paths through the lawn and a small area where we like to sit out. Everything else we leave. When the wildflowers finish and set seed, we cut back carefully — making sure the seeds have had the chance to fall before the cut begins. I’ve even acquired an old syth which I intend to use this year (imagine Poldark, but on a considerable budget cut!) That's about as complicated as it gets.

The transformation has been remarkable. Right now the grass, or shall we call it a mini meadow?, is full of pollinators — bees, hoverflies, butterflies and other insects moving between flowers we never planted and never watered. Even the flower borders have gone wild, with a blend of native wildflower and cultivated varieties. The crickets and grasshoppers will emerge soon, as they do every summer, and for a few weeks the garden hums in a way that a bowling green never could.

It doesn't take much. That's the thing we keep coming back to. You don't need a large garden, specialist knowledge or any particular equipment. You just need to resist the urge to mow. So ‘No mow May’ has become ‘No mow May, June and possibly July!’ One important thing to remember is to cut, leave the seeds to fall then rake all the cuttings off as wildflowers need unimproved ground.

The insects that this brings in are not just important pollinators, but also a vital food source for birds who are feeding young at this time of year. If you’ve been watching Springwatch then you’ll have seen that the majority of food being foraged for chicks is protein rich and comes in the form of invertebrates. 

A patch of long grass. A strip along the fence. The bit at the bottom you never quite get round to. Left alone, these corners become corridors — for insects, for small mammals, for the birds that feed on them. The garden stops being a surface to maintain and starts being a place where things live. 

If you’re a fan of butterflies then there are several butterfly species that rely on Nettles as the food source for their caterpillars, so maybe leave a clump here and there? Who doesn’t like a butterfly?

We're surrounded here by some of the most extraordinary landscape in the UK and nature really needs a helping hand at the moment, which can start in our own gardens.