(“Clime” is a perfectly acceptable synonym for “climate” and is not a word I made up to fit the silly headline. Honest.)
This is the time of year when that defining outdoor chore of homeownership, mowing the lawn, becomes a bit problematic.
The “No Mow May” campaign has been around for a couple of years now, asking people not to cut the grass in early spring when pollinators need all the plants they can get.
While not mowing might seem too extreme — with all this rain, waiting a month would turn my yard into central Borneo — the campaign has helped us question the belief that anything other than a short, green monoculture is a crime against property values.
That’s all well and good, but it means that we have to stop and think before trundling out the lawnmower. Should I cut the lawn now? Wait a week? Cut the left half of the lawn now and the right half later? Do a mullet mow?
Mullet mow, you ask?
Regular readers might recognize that term, said Donna Miller of Canterbury, a Master Gardener who serves on the Pollinator Garden Certification committee. Named after the infamous haircut, it takes a “business in front, party in the back” approach to lawn maintenance by keeping stuff next to the road tidy and short, so as not to irritate the local busybodies, while letting the rest of the property run riot.
Whatever you decide, the reality underlying all this uncertainty is that the traditional suburban lawn has all the ecosystem benefits of a Dunkin’ parking lot. Maybe even fewer benefits, depending on how much fertilizer, weedkiller or anti-tick-and-mosquito chemicals you dump on it.
This matters because the U.S. has a lot of lawns: One NASA estimate said they cover 49,000 square miles throughout the country, about five times the area of New Hampshire.
And it matters because the insect world is a localized world that the rest of us depend on. If my desire for tidy surroundings is driving off or killing off the bugs that would otherwise live there, they won’t get replaced. This hurts the plants that depend on them for pollination as well as the birds and little creatures that eat them and probably other aspects of everyday life I’m unaware of.
The problem is that most of us like the look of a freshly mowed lawn. That includes me; I’m not sure if this is because of my suburban upbringing or ancestral memory of the East African plains where humanity evolved, but it’s true. I’m sort of irritated by the site of a ragged patchy lawn, especially if it’s mine.
Fortunately for the planet, I’m lazy and cheap, so I don’t do the most destructive stuff with chemical additives and non-native seeds — or even watering. My yard is a mishmosh of dandelions, violets and buttercups (pretty now, not so pretty later) and moss and escaped patches of thyme, all amid a couple different kinds of grass that have wandered in from other properties to see what was going on.
It’s not attractive unless you squint hard, and even then imagination is required.
But so what, right? We are grown-ups. We face reality even if reality means that things aren’t quite the way we’d like.
Now that we’ve learned that our green-carpet-is-mandatory mindset causes more damage than benefits, we’re changing. We’ll ditch regulations that lawns have to be eight inches tall or shorter at all times, and we’ll stop fretting about “weeds” in yards around us and we’ll start switching to ground covers and pollinator plants (many of which, let’s be honest, look like weeds) instead of sticking with a few species of imported grass seed that cost a bundle and take a ton of maintenance.
We’ll cut back on watering when possible, and cut way back on additives and be more thoughtful about mowing.
The result won’t be as pretty as we currently define “pretty,” but cultures change.
In the meantime, I think I’ll put the lawn mower away. Which is just as well: I have some extremely important napping to do.
Return to the Concord Monitor