A bit of rough

As regular readers will know, I'm prone to starting the odd post or two with faux-modest, but in reality self-aggrandising observations about how often I find myself at odds with my fellow citizens. I don't really mean to, but there you have it. Opposition is very much the name of the Coastalblog game. And so it is with the state of my garden.

Or rather, the pub's. I am blessed in my gaff with a very pleasant garden, which, when the weather's nice, pretty much guarantees me a busy day ( I know, hard old life, isn't it?). But what could I possibly find to argue with the general public with here?

Dear reader: mowing.

Now, I don't let it run completely wild (much as I'd like to), arsey though I am, I'm aware that it's helpful for people to be able to get the nice benches I spent so long building. But I don't share the English obsession with a tidy lawn, indeed, I'm positively anti it.

I did no mow May, and was pleased with the riot of daisies and clover that erupted, but there were enough remarks along the lines of it needing a cut for me to suspect that I'm in the minority.

The same applies to municipal spaces. I simply don't get the point of council's mowing every green space at the drop of a hat. There's a near unusable playing field near my house, constantly sodden even at times of drought. Yet every couple of weeks the local authorities see the need to mow it flat, just as the buttercups and trefoil are really starting to get going.

To my mind, not cutting verges and otherwise unused green spaces is a no brainer. Even if you don't share environmental concerns, even if you don't care in the slightest about the phenomenal biological diversity that a bit of neglect can engender, if nothing else, in these straitened times, it saves money. You'd have thought that, particularly in places like Cornwall, where climate change means the grass grows all year round, this would be jumped at by cash-strapped councils.

But they run up against our national hatred of nature. Because surely that's all it can be. When people put down environmentally ruinous AstroTurf, pave over front gardens so they can store more cars, write angry letters to local papers about verges left untrimmed, the only possible explanation is that we have a collective deep seated animus towards the natural world. That for us, so ersatz notion of "tidiness" is more important than life itself.

So I'd like to make the case for a bit of rough. For land left to be itself. Practising what I preach, a large patch of my own garden is only mown twice a year, and the upshot is remarkable, it's a space that's home for countless invertebrates, which on turn gives the hedgehogs and frogs something to hunt. Rather than a patch of sterile lawn, I've got a mini-jungle, a carbon sink that teems with life. It is, to my mind, infinitely preferable.