Monty Don is a green radical mugged by gardening reality
The garden guru has spoken and I can unshackle myself from the bonds of guilt. Actually that’s me and several million like-minded folk. We leapt upon Monty Don’s words over the weekend. “This spring and summer I have made a tightly mown and evenly green lawn,” he said, letting slip a U-turn as monumental as Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in 1812. “This is slightly surprising,” he added, “because I have long been on the record for advocating replacing lawns with long grass, ideally filled with naturalised flowers.”
You don’t say. This mower fanatic, and I am indeed a foot soldier in the legion of lawn lunatics – we must mow and we must mow often – had been cowed in the wake of Don’s previous utterances.
I shan’t forget the fateful blow he dealt us back in March 2021, talking of “the obsession” for mowing, “which tends to be male, which is controlling rather than embracing”. He then went from psychological attack to environmental: “Cutting grass,” he said, “burns lots of fossil fuel, makes a filthy noise and is about the most injurious thing you can do to wildlife.”
We should let the grass grow, he pleaded, and the eco-radicals, who each year bang on about No Mow May, hoisted him to their metaphorical shoulders. As we simple Middle Englanders retreated to our sheds and garages, cast an eye over our beloved machines, our ride-ons, push/hover/fly mowers and our strimmers and shed a gentle tear.
And ever since we’ve had to mow with a heavy burden of shame, embarrassed by the roar of our engines and, dispensing fuel, casting a furtive eye over our shoulder as if we were mid-bank heist.
But now Don has recanted, rediscovering the joy of mowing – not perhaps the peace that we seek, the blissful solace we find, undisturbed from our loved ones, subsumed under the roar of the engine, but the pleasure of lines, of light and shade and of the balance between the mown and the un-mown. That taste of joy, like the first sip of white Burgundy after a period off the wagon.
“Long grass fills a space to quite a surprising extent,” he now says, “whereas mown grass takes the same area and expands it. Gardens need room for the eye and mind to drift and breathe.”
Which is indeed the mower’s defence. We who mow seriously see philosophy in our work, not simply a relentless attack on growth and weeds. The neat lawn becomes a greater entity when it compares with the long grass. And because we have deigned it to be such, we relish our little opportunity to play God. There is always a thrill to allow, say, grass to grow in an orchard, and then to cut a path through it.
So there is sympathy with nature here, while we disparage the fanatics. Of which Don became one. Having led the charge with rants about male control and climate devastation, he now sees the light. And his recantation is a fabulous and simple morality tale. We mow because we just want the place to look nice, to show visitors that we care, that we’re not scruffy, that we want pretty areas to sit out in and for children to run about in.
In a week in which Just Stop Oil disruptors are getting to know His Majesty’s prisons, wouldn’t it be sweet if other eco-fanatics also had a good, head-long collision with reality? I’ll sit outside, feel my toes on the freshly cut grass and sip a glass of rosé to that.