Naomi Slade explains why she’s not a fan of artificial turf
I need the real deal to make my plot more appealing to wildlife
Ifeel little bit sheepish about admitting this, which is daft as I was not the perpetrator, but a fair bit of my garden is covered in artificial grass.
T here. I’ve said it. Do I feel better? No, not really. It’s still something that fills me with a nagging sense of guilt. Therefore, it must go.
I can (sort of) see the point of the stuff in hard-working areas such as pub beer gardens or balconies, where it’s really more about pleasantly carpeting an outdoor space. But, for me, in a garden situation it feels dishonest. Fake grass is like fake news. It’s a failure of horticulture.
Made of plastic, it’s actually not at all a fashionable or green idea, and with a thick layer of sand underneath it, it’s unclear at present where the water in the garden goes. In fact, when it has been raining, it’s weirdly warm and squishy underfoot.
It’s also barren – nothing can live on it or burrow into it; it provides no food for caterpillars and no flowers for the bees. And where I’ve pulled it back, the poor worms that are attempting to cross its subterranean sandy desert look pretty weak and hungry by the time I put them back in the border.
In addition to directly impeding the righteous process of growing plants and flowers in the soil, every time you pot something up you scatter a little compost on top of the hairy plastic, which is the very devil to remove. And, perversely, leaves you weeding your supposedly sterile greenery.
It would be nice, perhaps, to have some real grass in the garden, but we’ll have to see. In the meantime I’m pulling up the carpet – hacking it into large chunks with an old bread knife and donating it to a local school so that it doesn’t go to landfill.
Scraping back the sand reveals what I’ve really got. Soil in some places and slightly dodgy paving in others. But even this feels better. It can be dug and planted; covered in pots and colonised by algae.
Slowly but surely, the garden is becoming more about the plants and wildlife. A green and pleasant land, rather than one that is botanically stingy. And, with spring, it becomes more pleasing – and less meagre – every day.