When I moved from the United States to Britain in 2018, one of the first differences I noticed was the lawns. I went from Wheatfield, a suburban town in western New York between Niagara Falls and Buffalo, where more or less every home had an indistinguishable patch of green that was sprayed annually, cut weekly and watered sometimes daily.
But in front of the duplex suburban houses in East Linton, a small village in Scotland east of Edinburgh, where I bought a home, some lawns weren’t really lawns at all. These yards of shrubs, trees and flowering weeds were more like living mosaics — shaggy, distinct and alive with bugs and birdsong. They required neither insecticide nor mower.
In the seven years since, the proportion of unkempt lawns seems to have only grown. While Britons still have their share of turf grass lawns (albeit usually a small fraction of the size of their American counterparts), many British homeowners embrace wildlife or no-mow gardening — an approach that reduces labor and chemical use, celebrates aesthetic untidiness and welcomes biodiversity. Call it a postcolonial irony: Britons have kept their king but are free to let their gardens grow wild, while Americans continue to bow and scrape to a green tyrant.
In another irony, it was rich Britons in the 17th and 18th centuries who were — at least partly — responsible for popularizing lawns in the first place. Which makes me wonder: If Americans got the idea from the British, maybe we could take inspiration again, this time for something wilder, freer and more alive.
In June I traveled south to the village of Drayton (population: around 380) in the Somerset Levels, a low-lying wetland in southwestern England, near the neck of Cornwall. Drayton is known for its apples and wassailing, a midwinter folk tradition in which some of the villagers go door to door singing traditional blessings, collecting money for charity and getting tipsy on cider. I’d gone to see the gardens of locals participating in No-Mow May, a campaign organized by Plantlife, a conservation charity.