A couple of years ago, for good reasons, we had to leave the garden to its own devices for several months, by the end of which time nature had substantially reclaimed it. At the point when the front lawn reached chest height, and was so full of flowering grasses and weeds that it resembled a hay meadow, neighbours began sidling up to me and tentatively asking if I’d like them to send round their husband/grandson/goat to deal with the situation, and my breezy response was always the same: “That’s very kind of you, but we’re doing No-mow May.”
No-mow May had passed through No-mow June and was edging into No-mow July before we were in a position to reassert control, by which time the front lawn was very well seeded with weeds wild plants, but since then we’ve tended to keep it well enough shorn to hide that fact – except during the month of May. By late April this year the weeds wild plants were already growing fast, and R – who, for reasons that I’ve never understood given that we live in the country and are surrounded by the stuff, likes an area of tended grass – was starting to emit distress signals. “Don’t worry,” I said, in the same bright tone I took with the village during the weeks when the house was steadily disappearing from view. “I’ll deal with it.” R, with forty years of experience under his belt, knew better than to believe that I’d do anything at all while doing nothing was still an available option, and gave me a Special Look, but every now and then I like to confound people’s justifiably low expectations, so on the last day of the month I got the mower out and cut the grass, while carefully leaving behind the burgeoning swathes of wild flowers. R turned up just as I finished. “There you go!” I said, beaming. He walked around gazing at it all, in perfect imitation of Eeyore, and said, “Well, I suppose it does at least look planned.”
The upshot of all this is that I can currently step out of the front door straight into a wild flower meadow, which even on a day as cold and showery as today is full of pollinating insects. I concentrated on the Narcissus Fly here because I didn’t manage to get them all in the same plane of focus, but there was a splendid male Thick-legged Flower Beetle on the same flower head, and a tiny predatory wasp on the next-door bloom.
I love No-mow May.
R: L2, C9, D14.
