The perfect lawn is now a surprisingly controversial issue in gardening.
Some people want a smart, green surface with no flaws. Others say that such a lawn is an ‘ecological disaster.’
Sometimes we are urged to put our mowers away, either for the whole summer or just to mow less. Or we’re urged to do ‘No Mow May’ or similar initiatives to reduce lawn mowing.
So I have asked one of the world’s top lawn experts, David Hedges Gower, Chair of the Lawn Association, to help me sort out what a perfect lawn is. How much work do we really need to do to achieve it? And can we have a traditional lawn while also being environmentally friendly?
I also wanted to decide which way to go with our own lawn. We left it uncut for 6 weeks during ‘No Mow May’. Should we continue with the wilder look? Or will we regret it further down the line?
So what is a ‘perfect lawn’?
Firstly, David says that you think of the ‘perfect lawn’ as ‘the perfect lawn for you’. And that may – or may not – be mown green stripes.
Gardening is generally a traditional craft, but all traditions need questioning from time to time. Advice that worked for your parents may not work for you, because the world is different or our expectations have changed.
Sometimes the old ways are best. At other times, they’re not.
David founded The Lawn Association to provide ‘accurate and modern’ advice on maintaining your lawn. It has a YouTube channel with advice on choosing grasses and lawn care. And they also run lawn care courses for both homeowners and professionals.
David is not a fan of automatically feeding, watering, scarifying, aerating and using moss control on your lawn. He manages four lawns around his house (two belong to neighbours). He only feeds, scarifies, aerates and controls the moss on one of them.
So before you do anything to your lawn because of a gardening ‘to do’ list or ‘top lawn care tips’, he suggests you ‘ask yourself why you’re doing it first.’
What is the best treatment for my lawn?
David says that before you do any treatment on your lawn, decide what you want to achieve.
If you aren’t too bothered by neat stripes and vivid green colour, then you can have a lawn that doesn’t take too much time, effort or money to look after. And it will be environmentally friendly too.
There are essentially four approaches to lawns today.
The traditional perfect lawn – good for keen gardeners
The ‘perfect lawn’ is always very green, moss-free and weed-free. It has neat stripes and tailored edges.
This style of lawn sets off formal gardens and herbaceous borders beautifully. Until recently, it was considered the standard that we should all aim for.
The Lawn Association suggests aerating the lawn in autumn, using hollow tine forks not ordinary garden forks. You can also rent or buy lawn aerating machines, which can do a 250sq m lawn in about twenty minutes. You should also scarify (which chops the grass up as a kind of ‘autumn pruning.’) Add moss control products if you have moss and feed with a fertiliser.
But is the perfect lawn too much work for your lifestyle?
Many people find that this is too much hard work for today’s busy lives.
Others say that such a highly managed lawn uses too much water, chemicals and fuel in mowing or using other machines.
But David Hedges Gower has a 120 sq metre lawn which he keeps to the ‘perfect lawn’ standard. This needs an hour in early spring feeding (using organic fertiliser) and scarifying it, but he doesn’t use herbicides to kill weeds. He also mows this around once a week and never waters it.
This type of perfect lawn is good for people who enjoy gardening. They’re happy to spend time looking after their garden and want it to look its very best.
The meadow lawn – the perfect lawn for wildlife-friendly gardens
When I asked wildlife garden landscape expert Joel Ashton for his 5 top wildlife garden tips, one was ‘put the mower away.’
So the second lawn option is to stop mowing, allowing grasses to grow long. These, in theory, turn into meadows, which benefit biodiversity. Meanwhile you don’t spend so much time, money and effort looking after your lawn.
However, it’s important to recognise that you will have to do some work for this kind of a lawn. You will probably want to weed out pernicious perennial weeds which can take over. You’ll be mowing paths through so that you can walk through it. And it may not suit families whose children want to play games on a lawn.
Creating a meadow lawn isn’t always as simple as letting lawn grass grow long, although that can look good.
And you could always experiment with growing grass longer by doing No Mow May. It was started by the charity Plantlife to encourage people not to mow their gardens for a month. I’ve done No Mow May for 2 years.
Many people like to leave just a few patches of grass to grow long, while mowing the main part of the lawn. This can look very pretty.
The ‘nectar lawn’ – is it OK to mow every other week?
A nectar lawn is a more wildlife friendly version of the traditional lawn, because you don’t mow it as often. You don’t use herbicides to kill weeds either. You mow once every two or three weeks to allow small, low flowers such as daisies and clover to flower and feed pollinators.
People often ask if it’s OK to mow every other week. It is, and it creates a nectar lawn.
When you cut it, it returns to looking like a traditional lawn. I first heard about a nectar lawn when I interviewed Jane Moore, author of Planting for Butterflies. We now mow less often, and we never used herbicides on the lawn anyway.
A nectar lawn does look shaggy in its second or third week compared to a traditionally mown lawn. But it withstands drought a little better.
David Hedges Gower says that mowing less often allows the daisies, clover and other wildflowers to flourish, so the lawn grasses will slowly become less dominant.
My husband mows our lawn. He has adopted the nectar lawn with enthusiasm. This is partly because he would like to increase biodiversity and partly because he does less mowing! Definitely a win-win for him.
He says that most of the work in mowing is taking the grass bag off the mower and throwing the grass in the compost heap. When this mower finally stops working, I think we will buy a ‘mulching mower’ that leaves grass on the lawn to return the nutrition to the soil.
The ‘good enough lawn’ for those who want to save time, effort and money
Many people aren’t hugely interested in their lawn. I admit to belonging in this group. For me, the lawn isn’t the most important part of the garden in terms of how it looks. I’d just like it to look OK and not to be too much trouble. The nectar lawn approach suits us, because it means we spend less time mowing and we are helping wildlife.
But I know that some people feel judged for not having the perfect lawn. And others live in neighbourhoods where there are regulations around how you keep your lawn.
Although I now have a nectar lawn, we’ve spent many years with the ‘good enough’ lawn. We never water it. And we don’t fertilise it or use moss control. Nor have we aerated it or scarified it.
And our lawn is OK. People may say that it’s uneven, that it has some moss in shady areas and that it’s patchily green. Those criticisms are fully justified.
If you really do want your lawn to stay green all summer, you will probably have to water it. However, David says that most people in the UK are now happy to let their lawns go brown. It saves time, money and effort and the lawn will bounce back.
What’s the best low maintenance lawn?
One of the lawns David Hedges Gower showed me was in a neighbour’s garden. They never use weed killer, fertiliser or moss control on it. They don’t scarify it and they don’t water it. It’s mown continuously with a battery powered robot mower which deposits the grass cuttings back on the lawn. They are reabsorbed, so they feed the lawn.
That’s probably the easiest, low maintenance lawn you can get. It won’t be striped.
A battery powered robot mower is currently considered a more environmentally friendly option than a petrol mower. (However, there are environmental issues around everything, such as lithium mining for batteries.)
This option is probably the lowest maintenance surface you will find for your garden.
Is it better to mow the lawn more often?
Frequent, regular mowing does help the lawn get thicker, says David Hedges Gower. That means that it can out-compete weeds better. ‘Grass is a plant and mowing is essentially pruning,’ he says. Just as pruning or pinching out makes plants branch out, so regular mowing can help lawn grass branch out and look more like a ‘perfect lawn’.
But, as he says, it’s all a question of what you want. If you want daisies and clover for pollinators, then it’s fine to mow the lawn once every two weeks rather than weekly.
If you subsequently want to return to a traditional green striped lawn, then you can go back to regular mowing. It will help the grass re-establish over the daisies, clover and other weeds.
In Where to Start With a Neglected Garden, Natalie and Mike Newman bought a house which had two lawns, thick with weeds, brambles and self seeded trees. They had the self seeded trees and brambles professionally cleared on one lawn, then re-seeded it.
But their front lawn still had some grass left, although it was thick with thistles. So they weeded out the thistles and kept mowing the grass weekly. It took a year, but they regained the proper lawn just by mowing and weeding.
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