Trust the Swedes to turn an ugly garden into a thing of beauty

An email arrives from the Royal Horticultural Society’s resident futurologist, predicting gardening trends in the coming year. Purple veg are set to be a thing, with the mauve spectrum encompassing not just the more familiar purple sprouting broccoli and Lollo Rossa lettuce, but carrots, cauliflowers and peas.

The recent hot, dry summers have favoured the cultivation of figs, apricots, melons and vines, while the inexorable march of wild gardening has advanced from designated wildflower patches to invade the herbaceous border. Plants that used to be mercilessly eradicated by vigilant gardeners – dandelion, plantain and the malodorous Herb Robert – are now not just tolerated, but positively encouraged.

Yet there is no mention of that hottest (in every sense) of gardening trends, the ugly lawn. Many of us, during the drought-gripped summers of the past two years, watched in dismay as our grass turned from verdant green to crispy brown, and hosepipe bans silenced the hissing of summer lawn sprinklers.

But on the Swedish island of Gotland, a terrible lawn – the uglier the better – has become a badge of pride in a keenly contested local competition that swiftly turned global.

The Swedes, like the Brits, cherish their lawns: a well kept lawn has traditionally been the sign of a gardener who knows her Dwarf Ryegrass from her Slender Creeping Red Fescue. But in 2022, when a water shortage on Gotland resulted in an irrigation ban, the municipality started an ugly lawn competition as an entertaining way of encouraging people to save water.

Not only did water consumption on Gotland fall by 5 per cent, but the modest regional contest sparked international interest: this year there were entries from Germany, France, Canada, Croatia, the US and UK. The standard was impressively high: “All of them were hideous and worthy of winning,” said Mimmi Gibson, Director of Brand at Region Gotland.

But after hours of deliberation, the judges, who included the broadcaster and RHS Gold medal-winning garden designer, Diarmuid Gavin, awarded the prize to a bandicoot-infested patch in Tasmania, owned by Kathleen Murray, who noted that her ex-husband “left with the lawnmower back in 2016”.

A bleak midwinter tour of my own lawn suggests that it could be a promising candidate for the next competition: strewn with sodden detritus washed up by the recent floods, it features worm casts, moss, thistles, fairy rings, a few intrepid daisies, and outside the kitchen door where I scatter birdseed, a considerable expanse of blasted heath created by the resident moorhens.

Unraked, unfertilised, unweeded, it is a model of virtuously unkempt ugliness. Yet as I contemplate this vista of wildlife-friendly neglect, into my mind’s eye there pops a wistful image: a rare moment last year between the floods of winter and the midsummer drought, when the old apple trees were in blossom above a lawn mown in velvety stripes.

It was a perfect vision of an English garden in spring – and like all such moments, fleeting. Something like it will come again this year, no doubt. But if another parched summer follows, rather than mourning our moribund lawns, we could retire to the shade of our newly planted vine arbours, with their clusters of ripening grapes, and learn to embrace the spirit of Gotland, where the municipal website gotland. com/uglylawn/ offers a handy guide on how to organise your very own ugly lawn competition.