The benefits of not cutting your lawn

One of the biggest losses of our countryside in the last hundred or so years has been our grasslands. For example, in the UK we've lost around 97% of our lowland meadows. Some have been built but the biggest effect has been through agriculture and chemical enrichment of the soil. This 'improved grassland' brings increased grass yields for livestock but at the expense of the diversity of many of our wildflowers who are easily outcompeted. This and the consequential loss of the seedbank mean restoring our meadows and grasslands often takes decades to achieve.

One of the best and largest areas of grassland we have in the UK is Salisbury Plains. This is due to the land being property of the MoD (Ministry of Defence) and as such it missed out on the agricultural intensification that has happened since the 1950s. But other areas have missed out on this too. 

Our roadside verges and many of our garden lawns are untreated and cut regularly which removes nutrients from the soil. This creates 'semi-improved' grasslands which, if managed, can create small wildlife areas which are great for our wildflowers and many of our insects, especially bees. 

How to do this? - Simply though cutting your lawn less and later on in the summer (July onwards). This takes out nutrients which allows flowers to compete better with the grasses (make sure you remove the cuttings) and allows flowers to blossom and set seed providing food and nectar for insects. Furthermore it saves you time and money. Just make sure you don't cut in spring and early summer when the plants need to grow and flower.

This is the first year I have been able to do this with part of our front lawn. So, using the Wild Flower Key by Francis Rose, I had a little bio-blitz of the lawn to see how many species of plant I could find. I'm sure I missed a few but I counted 24 different species from the beautiful Oxeye daisy, the bee-friendly Red clover, to the tasty Wild strawberry.

List

1) Black medick
2) Bristly oxtongue
3) Bulbous buttercup
4) Cat's ear
5) Cocksfoot grass
6) Common mouse-ear
7) Common sorrel
8) Common vetch
9) Couch grass
10) Creeping buttercup
11) Daisy
12) Dandelion
13) Germander speedwell
14) Ground ivy
15) Lesser trefoil
16) Oxeye daisy
17) Prickly sow thistle
18) Primrose
19) Ragwort
20) Red clover
21) Rye grass
22) Spotted medick
23) St John's wort
24) Wild strawberry

This is already much more diverse than the rest of the lawn and I am looking forward to doing the count next year when it will have had its first full year of being managed in this way.