No Mow May.
It's easy. Just do nothing.
It’s nesting season. The starlings are busy to and fro with beaks stuffed with grass. Bundles of fresh fluffy goslings are following their parents around the street. The meadows and verges are bursting with verdant life. Spring seems to be really showing off this year. What can you do to help it?
I was thrilled to receive an email from our estate managers announcing a commitment to the No Mow May movement this year.
No Mow May is simple enough to get involved with: just leave the mower in the shed for a month. At least. This time of year is vital for pollinators emerging from their hibernation to get busy collecting from the wildflowers. But it’s also a time of year that humans have decided the strimmer needs to get busy cutting everything back.
Think about it: the time and money spent and the fossil fuels burned simply hacking back the shoots of life that are bursting onto the scene. We go out of our way to trade vibrant, colourful meadows humming with activity for ecologically sterile swathes of purposeless grass. It’s utter madness, achieves nothing, but every year the mowers fire up to wreak destruction on tiny ecosystems for the sake of habit.
No Mow May is a no-brainer.
By simply letting things grow, we benefit wildlife, we save our time and our money, and we prevent greenhouse gases burned pumped into the atmosphere. These are all undeniably good things.
And if you want to take things even further, ditch your lawn permanently. I’ve written at length about the futility of maintaining a lawn when our gardens could be rich with texture and biodiversity instead. Imagine if all our lawns were divided up into even small patches of wildflower meadows. How much additional life could we harbour? How much more could we reconnect with the feel off long grass around our ankles, with the sounds of bumblebees floating lazily past on a summer’s day?
Anything we can do to rebuild our wildflower meadows is effort well spent. Geniune wildflower meadows are one of the rarest habitats in Britain, having lost nearly 97% of them in under a hundred years.
All we have to do is let nature take some time to recover. Give the pesticides a rest, put the mower away, and with a little nudge in the right direction we can bring our cities back to life.
How are you supporting nature this month? Let me know in the comments.
Love the move of your estate managers and your call to the same action, Thomas. It breaks my heart when I see people mow and ‚clean‘ their ‚gardens’. They always seem to do it in the complete wrong time of the year. I guess it is especially important to call for a No Mow Spring in England where grass and lawns seem to be woven into society, or aren‘t they? In German these lawns, which are of course also very common in the rest of Europe, and the world as a matter of fact, are called ‚Englischer Rasen‘, which means ‚English lawn‘. That is how far they have come, unfortunately. Let‘s hope your call to action resonates with many. Here is to No Mow May. And maybe it can even be embellished with some seed balls 🙃🌸🐝.
Just found you Thomas. On the cusp of July and have not mowed my front "lawn". Lots of red clover, white clover, daisy fleabane, Queen Anne's Lace, several cinquefoils. milkweed, evening primrose and a few seeded in perennials. My neighbor who is a gardener approves. Management has not complained. It is work, still weeding out clumps of grass and removing grass seedheads. Have cut down asters and goldenrods so they bloom at a lower height. But I took great joy at watching a swallowtail feeding from one clover and moving an inch to the next and the next. Am outside a small town in New England, US.