Life

The Casual Gardener: The lawn's days are numbered

Changing attitudes suggest the centuries-old desire for an expanse of short-cropped grass is on the wane

Has the lawn had its day?
Has the lawn had its day? Has the lawn had its day?

AS THE patriarchy withers so too does that antiquated symbol of male status and quixotism – the garden lawn.

First fashionable among the European aristocracy in the 1700s, a neat, well-cropped expanse of garden was a symbol of affluence, signalling that the owner could afford the numerous servants who’d clip and scythe it manually. In the early days, thyme and camomile was preferred, before grass became the standard.

The lawn as status symbol was exported to the US in the 19th century, where it became the must-have feature for newly affluent suburban dwellers.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designer of New York’s Central Park, is said to have popularised lawns and brought gardening to the masses.

In the 1860s, when Olmsted was commissioned to design one of the first pre-planned suburbs in the US, he stipulated that each house be set back 30 ft from the road. Fences, walls and other barriers were banned, and tending your lawn became a source of neighbourhood pride – and conformity. Naturalised planting, of the kind which later characterised the New American garden style, was regarded as undesirable.

For a century or more, the aesthetic of closely clipped grass predominated and tending to the lawn became the measure of every middle-aged man. A mower, preferably with a roller to give the grass a striped effect, became the essential accessory. Meanwhile, the garden centre shelves creaked with a selection of chemical products designed to kill daisies, moss and leatherjackets, while delivering a dose of nitrogen that would imbue your sward with a deep, unnatural green.

In the press and on the TV, there’d be seasonal advice on scarifying and aerating, and mending dips on your lawn, which if not daisy and clover free and looking like a bowling green was an abomination.

But in the era of the new normal, the lawn may have had its day.

Environmental considerations are primarily responsible for this paradigm shift, which is accompanied by a growing desire to… erm… let things grow.

The Silent Spring that Rachel Carson first identified in 1962 has continued to prevail for almost six more decades, with the use of glyphosate and other herbicides and pesticides still widespread in agriculture and horticulture, but finally it seems that history is back on the side of biodiversity.

This week Trinity College Dublin began transforming its manicured front lawns on College Green into bee-friendly wildflower meadows. In an online poll held in February that attracted 14,000 votes, 90 per cent in favour of the conversion to native Irish wildflower meadows.

The meadow turf lawn laid last week includes 25 types of native Irish wildflower.

Professor John Parnell, botanist and chair of Trinity's grounds and gardens committee, hopes the urban wildflower meadows "will support greater biodiversity and pollinators in the heart of the city centre".

"We hope that this will be quite a bright and colourful area with things like Oxeye daisy, and cowslip, and wild carrot coming up at different times so there will be a sequence of flowering and that will offer the pollinating insects a menu that goes through the season,” he said.

"Hopefully, it will increase the number of insects that we see in the centre of the city.”

It’s only a small gesture and won’t on its own save the planet, but in its own way the move is akin to the dumping of Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol Harbour.