The Little Guys

April 7th, and a week of almost unbroken sunshine has transformed the garden. The young fruit trees are on the verge of blossoming, the new roses are forming leaf buds, and the first tulips have opened. The grass has also started to sprout, and I am conscious of the buzz of neighbours’ lawnmowers at the weekend as the traditional spring trimming begins in earnest. Lawns are a peculiarly British passion: in Shakespeare’s time it was ‘laund’ not lawn, stemming from the old French ‘launde’ meaning an area of open ground, or clearing in a wood (“Through this Laund anon the Deere will come”, Henry VI). Long before Will, one of our earliest recorded garden authorities, Albertus Magnus, wrote in 1260 that “the sight is in no way so pleasantly refreshed as by fine and close grass kept short”. Refreshing indeed if you were resident in a monastery as Albertus was, and closely shorn grassy areas were prized from the Middle Ages onwards for archery practice, bowling and so on, but it took the landscaping revolution led by Capability Brown and others in the eighteenth century to embed the idea of a velvet sward surrounding a house into the national psyche. From the scale of Blenheim Palace to a suburban plot, there has been no looking back since then: that smell of mown grass pervades so many childhood memories, along with images of your parents reverently placing deckchairs on the freshly striped lawn, and it is still to this day the green heart of so many British gardens.

Chez Crossley, there has never been so much love extended to lawns. I think living in a desert for over a decade drives home the high water consumption/low productivity issues with expanses of the verdant stuff; then of course lawn mowers are not wildly exciting gardening machinery compared to for example log splitters; and most importantly, there is an increasing awareness of how much that patch of grassy ground is able to support an immense variety of life when it is not being scalped weekly. Read anything by the renowned ecologist and founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Dave Goulson, but especially in this context his 2019 book The Garden Jungle, to appreciate how important domestic gardens can be for our wildlife, and how benign neglect can help lawns support a tapestry of vital insect life.

We have large areas of green in the garden - I would call them moss carpets perhaps, rather than lawns - but my favourite is at the back of the house, under our huge lime tree. I would guess that it had started off as conventional lawn, with perhaps some spring bulb planting, but by the time we arrived here in spring 2019, the little guys had emphatically taken over.

Early spring flowers are very beautiful, and many of them are also very, very small. But who needs to be tall and showy in early April? Chances are you will have your head taken off by spring gales, or your extravagant blooms wrecked by late frosts, and anyway the trees are not yet in leaf, so no need to expend precious energy reaching for the sun.

Most important though, the pollinators on whom you depend are now emerging sleepily, in greater and greater numbers, and they in turn depend on you for sustenance: and there you are, close to the ground, with perfectly simple flower forms, easily accessible for bees, bumblebees, hoverflies, bee-flies (yes, bee-flies) and so on.

Our blooming carpet under the lime tree extends from one end of the ‘lawn’ to the other, and seems to require no maintenance at all. We abdicated all responsibility last year and let the vigorously self seeding cow parsley succeed the diminutive spring flowers, gaining in pollinators what we possibly forsook in neighbourly relations.

Currently, we have celandines (ranunculus ficaria), slender speedwell (veronica filiformis), wild violets (viola odorata), daisies (bellis perennis), primroses (primula vulgaris) and forget-me-nots (myosotis sylvatica) spreading happily around the edges. I give their Latin names here to give them some nomenclatural heft, some of the horticultural clout and status accorded their more grandiose peers: many people would walk on speedwell unawares, yet its finely striped lilac is a match for the violet’s more famous form, and surely a dandelion is just a mini chrysanthemum? As I write this, the whole expanse is humming, and long may it be so.