What time is it

This summer saw vast tracts of parks and lawns scorched by drought in the UK, but more watering is not a sustainable solution. Patrick Barkham asks what the ...

I hug myself to see it growing out of the corner of my eye; ankle, and then shin-high, delighted that I’m doing my bit by doing as little as possible. The British fascination with lawncare is older than we might presume, but it was doubtless raised to something like a high science by Capability Brown, the 18th century landscape architect whose “pleasure gardens” for the great and good of English society turned a passion into a fervor. “We can retain the moisture, and that’s something that farmers will need to be keen on in the UK in the future.” Grasslands that we use for leisure in cities and for food in the countryside will change in an era of rapid global heating. The good news is that the foremost pleasure of rewilding is the fact that, for once, the morally correct thing to do might be ‘less than you were doing before’. After eleven years in London, my wife and I are finally renting somewhere with a garden, which means I am lawn-adjacent for the first time in my adult life, and resentful of the responsibilities this entails. “For me the hope is that these new grasslands can be productive and resilient – that’s what we really want.” “We are very familiar with grasses, and there is a very tight bond between humans and grasses and grasslands,” says Gonzalo Irisarri, an agronomist studying the impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation weather system on hay production. “Having daisies and other species is really lovely and slowly moving away from a single species of grass that you mow to death is a positive thing.” “Three species of grasses provide us with 50% of the calories we consume worldwide – wheat, corn [maize] and rice.” There’s a “substantial minority” of farmers who are investigating alternatives to ryegrass monocultures, says Norton, who works with farmers in northwest England. We rely on grass in cities and in the countryside.