Letting the grass grow

You might find yourself unpopular if you let the grass grow, but nature will thank you.

The people that live near me have immaculate gardens, unlike mine their lawns a trimmed and weeds removed, plans rotated, everything is incredibly neat.

My law is long, it is full of clover, moss and weeds. The bushes are unkempt, brambles grow alongside all sorts of things, there is an Oak sapling and lots of things have started to germinate that have landed either from near or afar, some things will have arrived on (or through) an animal.

People notice how messy (natural) my garden is. But I notice something different, I notice how alive my garden is and how dead those around me are.

Close by the garden paths are routinely sanitised with bleach, the leaves are picked from the lawn and weeds are eradicated. Nothing that has not been planted grows and flowers are carefully rotated, hedges trimmed routinely, lawns cut into pristine green carpets.

Nothing lives in these gardens, the birds do not settle in the trees, there are no butterflies or insects, these gardens are ornamental but barren.

My garden is full of insects, there are crickets, moths, caterpillars, butterflies, bees, wasps, flies, worms, ants, ladybirds, and a whole manner of birds some regular visitors, others who nest and live with us for part of the year.

I love the mess, because it means that each day I go out not to the same thing, instead there are new sounds and sights, I chat with the birds and find new creatures I have never seen before, I hear an array of sounds and find new things growing, there is fruit that I didn't plant.

Convincing people to leave their gardens to nature is not a battle I shall win, so this year I am starting to think about how I can shape the garden so that it retains the natural splendor that mean so many things want to make it their home, while making it somewhat more presentable to more traditional tastes.

My hope is that they will start to notice how nature is thriving and perhaps adopt some changes to desanitise their plots, so that all the things we need to maintain our fine balanced ecosystem perhaps have some better chance of survival in a challenging and rapidly changing climate.