Why you should turn your lawn into a meadow
Most lawns are biodiversity deserts, but there is a simple way to encourage nature – and you don’t even have to ditch the mower
My garden sings its own song. It starts after the dawn chorus with the honeybees, followed by the heavier buzz of the bumbles, punctuated by the hoverflies’ higher pitch. You can even sometimes hear the rustle and creak of beetles as evening comes. To lie among it, eyes closed, is to hear something exquisite.
My garden sings this song because it is allowed to. I have long been a proponent of neglecting lawns to nurture nature, as Margaret Renkl recently made the case for in the New York Times – and there isn’t a manicured strip of green that doesn’t ache to do the same.