LAWNS & GRASS

Lawns are a major part of most gardens: where, depending on age, we relax or play. Their green sets off the colours of flower beds. However, from the point of view of wildlife, they are often the most sterile parts of a garden. A neatly trimmed area of grass without other plants supports very little invertebrate life: ants during the day and slugs at night, perhaps.

Obviously if you wish to play bowls or croquet you will want a perfectly flat surface with very short grass. Otherwise, you might wish to add some variety to the lawn, perhaps by including wildflowers, by leaving some parts less intensively trimmed or even by replacing it with meadow grasses and flowers.

Creating a semi-natural 'meadow' is not easy. It is necessary to remove the richly growing grasses of lawn mixes and to impoverisih the soil (preferably by removing most of the top soil if this is deep - use it to raise your flower beds!) before sowing with a mixture of native grasses and other plants. It must be cut only two or three times a year (when the flowers have gone to seed). However, quite good results can be obtained just by leaving some patches of an ordinary lawn (perhaps a 1 metre stretch around a hedge or shrubbery) to grow in the early summer and autumn. This will allow non-grasses to establish and flower; the high grass will provide a platform for spiders and beetles to prey for food and shelter for them over winter. Alternatively meadow plants or, for spring colour, bulbs, especially daffodils, may be planted into the lawn.

Mowing is critical. In meadows the grass is trimmed occasionally by grazing animals. Unless grazing is intensive, there are always patches of grass at different heights. The animals also compress some parts of the soil surface with their hooves while tearing up others. They fertilise the meadow patchily with their urine and faeces. All these lead to a variety of micro-habitats which favour different invertebrates.