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Growing up wild

Kids adore it, it's good for nature and there's zero effort involved. What's not to love about No Mow May?

Published: 30/04/2022

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Embrace a wilder garden this month and you could see more butterflies, bees and wildlife buzzing around your garden.

By resisting the urge to mow, you’ll not only boost pollen stocks for pollinators but you’ll see wildflowers spring up and create a rich natural world for the kids to explore.

The results of giving the mower a breather for May can be spectacular. Last year people who took part in Plantlife’s No Mow May campaign reported more than 250 plant species including wild strawberry, wild garlic and a dazzling array of rarities including adders’-tongue fern, meadow saxifrage, snake’s-head fritillary, and eyebright. They also recorded almost 100 species of pollinators on their lawns, including 25 types of moth and butterfly and 24 types of bee.

Embracing a little more wildness in our gardens can be a boon for plants, butterflies and bees

‘These results underline how embracing a little more wildness in our gardens can be a boon for plants, butterflies and bees,’ says Ian Dunn, Plantlife's CEO. ‘We are excited by the unfolding dawn of a new British lawn.’

Letting your lawn, or even just a small patch of it, grow long can really help bees. Plantluife found that in just one metre square of a typical lawn last year had 17 daisies and a smattering of buttercups and dandelions. Such a square of lawn would produce about two milligrams of nectar sugar and three microlitres of pollen per day. A 100 m² area of lawn would produce enough pollen to stock up six mining bee brood cells and enough nectar sugar to meet the baseline needs of six bumblebees a day.

Many may consider them weeds, but dandelions should be welcomed in summer as they are disproportionately important for pollinators (their fatter stems make them far easier for little hands to use to create beautiful dandelion chains rather than daisy chains too). Just 8 dandelion flowers might produce enough nectar sugar to meet an adult bumblebee’s baseline energy needs.

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Wild play

But it’s not just wildlife that benefits from a wild lawn. Children can get so much out of it too.

When my kids were toddlers, I mowed a curvy path at the top of our sloping garden and let the rest grow wild. The result was a gorgeous meadow the children could run through the middle of with the flowers and grasses growing almost as tall as them. Hurtling unsteadily barefoot through this mini meadow was one of their favourite summer activities and, now tweens and teens, they still love the years I leave it wild with just a neat path snaking through the middle.

A meadow can be magical for young kids. In children’s games, a mini meadow can become a mystical forest, it’s made for hide and seek or a summer picnic and is fruitful for mini-beast hunting and plant identification. Sprinkle some wildflower seeds and come the end of the season, you can harvest the odd flower and preserve it in a flower press. 

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A mini meadow will attract butterflies, which can be great fun to identify. Check out the Butterfly Conservation identification guide to help your children get started. 

And with 270 different species of wild bee in Britain, even older kids will find a challenge in identifying what they find. Take a look at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s wonderful identification guide for help. 

At the end of the No Mow month, it gets even more exciting as children can get involved in a citizen science activity that will help experts understand which flowers are thriving and how much nectar they are producing. Between May 21st and May 30th, just section off a one metre square of your unmown lawn and count how many flowers are growing there. You can find a wildflower identification sheet here.

Once you’ve submitted your results to the Every Flower Counts survey, you’ll get a Personal Nectar Score, showing how many bees your lawn can support. The combined results will provide a snap-shot health-check of the UK’s lawns. 

When May’s over, if you miss your lawn or need it back for garden games, then mow away. But if you have space, it’s worth considering leaving a section to grow wild and encourage flowers for pollinators. And yes, there’s a hashtag for that too…perhaps you could do #LetitBloomJune or #KneeHighJuly?

 

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