Mowing tips for encouraging wildlife

Cut once every four weeks

The 2019 No Mow May experiment revealed the highest number of flowers on lawns mown in this way. Ideally, leave around three to five centimetres of grass length.

Leave areas of long grass

The experiment also resulted in greater diversity of flowers in areas of grass that were left completely unmown, with oxeye daisy, field scabious and knapweed offering up important nectar sources.

You don’t have to stop mowing completely

Some species, such as daisy and bird’s foot trefoil, are adapted to growing in shorter swards. Cutting flowers from these plants once a month stimulates them to produce more blooms.

stopping mowing for another month in July, participants saw a resurgence of white clover, selfheal and bird’s foot trefoil. The average square-metre patch of lawn surveyed after the experiment produced enough nectar to support almost four honey bees per day.

For Plantlife’s botanist Trevor Dines, it’s a case of changing the way we all think about how we control our gardens. “It’s time for people to relax a little bit,” he says. “Avoiding mowing in this way means that instead of a dull monoculture of green concrete, your garden will be thriving and full of interest. I don’t think people realise how diverse our lawns can be.”

And the option to continue as we have been is not really a viable one. “The statistics for wildflower meadow loss are shocking: around 7.5 million acres have gone,” says Trevor. He describes how a colleague’s grandfather used to walk from Stratford-upon-Avon to Birmingham as a boy and not leave a wildflower meadow. “The loss of this landscape means a loss of food source for pollinators, which is one of the key drivers of their decline.”

It’s not necessary, either, to simply leave your garden to the elements. The ultimate concept of No Mow May is not really to stop mowing in May specifically, or to leave whole swathes of your lawn unmown. Behind the catchy title is a simple concept: get people to change their habits so that they mow less – ideally once a month – and possibly even leave a patch or two of grass to grow long.

Gardens can really make a difference to the number of wildflowers in this country. As Trevor says: “We’ve lost the mosaic of meadows from the countryside but at least within our gardens we can do something in response to that.”

USEFUL INFORMATION

How to take part in No Mow May

• Register for Every Flower Counts at plantlife.org.uk

• Leave your mower in the shed from 23 to 31 May and again from 11 to 19 July.

• At the end of each period, throw a tennis ball into a patch of your lawn, mark out a square metre with sticks around the ball and count and identify the flowers in that square and then upload your findings.