IN May, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) announced a ban on artificial grass at its events this year, including the Chelsea Flower Show.
The ban was introduced on the basis that artificial grass damages the environment with a double whammy – fossil fuels are used in its manufacture and once deployed it "creates a sterile, lifeless area in the garden".
The RHS was responding to a recent surge in the popularity of fake grass, which is regarded by some as easier to manage and look after than fresh lawn.
Confession time – I have some artificial grass. At four yards square it covers just a fraction of my garden's area and can therefore be regarded as 'for personal use', to borrow a phrase often applied to another kind of grass. Funnily enough, whereas the use of 'grass', meaning marijuana, was once frowned upon, these days you're more likely to get berated for using what was once seductively known as astroturf, which is quite rightly regarded as anathema not only to taste but to biodiversity.
My own personal stash... sorry... mat of artificial grass was bought more than a decade ago because of lawn vanity, an affliction I have since overcome. When my now-adult children were younger, I hung a tyre swing from the branch of a sycamore that overhangs grass I'd sown a few years earlier with the intention of having a lawn. For a while I tended to the lawn regularly and was naively obsessed with controlling daisies and moss, even resorting to applying a feed-and-weed that made my grass look artificially green. However, its pristine look was steadily being blighted by what started out as surface marks but were in danger of becoming a trench caused by swinging children's feet. My solution was to guard the grass beneath with the mat, which I'm sure cost me the best part of £60. When the kids weren't using the swing I'd store the mat elsewhere.
The swing is long gone and where a lawn once grew is in line to be transformed into something more inspired. However. the artificial grass mat survives, its plastic blades and rubber underside barely impacted by more than ten years of weathering. I'm going to be honest here, it has come in handy many times in a variety of ways, including being deployed in the goalmouth as a budding keeper took to diving.
It was this latter experience that led me to the even greater sin of recommending plastic grass to a friend with a suburban garden and three football mad boys.
It's something that's niggled me quite a lot since and increasingly so as the backlash against artificial grass builds. Currently there's an online petition urging the British government to tax fake grass and there's even a Twitter account which is "showcasing the hideous trend of plastic lawns. Cutting through greenwash and exposing examples of garden habitats being replaced by sterile and lifeless astroturf".
In my defence I urged my friend to plant plenty of climbers around the edges to in some way offset the negative impact on biodiversity of an outdoor, plastic carpet. Like mine, my friend's children are now young adults, no longer in need of a safe place to play and I was recently informed that the back garden in question will likely be returned to something much more environmentally friendly, or real grass at least.
Sign the petition to introduce an 'ecological damage tax' on astroturf lawns/artificial grass at petition.parliament.uk/petitions/608295
