Just let it grow
BETWEEN 1983 AND 1994, I owned a house in Gillingham, Kent. It was not an exceptional building, but it had a long back garden – 180 feet in length and about 22 feet wide. Much of the garden was covered with a lawn bordered by plant beds. When I first moved in, I attended the garden keenly even though I had little idea about gardening. As soon as I unearthed weeds, they re-appeared. It was most disheartening. I discovered that planting shrubs was the best way to hide the weeds, about which I soon stopped worrying.
As for the lawn, I acquired a mowing machine, and for some months, or maybe years, I trimmed the grass regularly. Then, I found that whenever I cut the lawn, my nose would start streaming and I would have fits of sneezing. I realised that I had a grass allergy. So, I decided to cease mowing the lawn. I let the grass grow higher and higher. When it reached its greatest height, people sitting in the garden would be hidden by it. At the end of the year, the grass collapsed and more or less disappeared – only to begin growing again the following spring. I let nature take its course, and ceased worrying about it until a deputation consisting of my immediate neighbours came to my house to complain about my unruly lawn and garden. One of them, an elderly lady, was convinced that all the weeds and insects in her garden had come from mine.
One summer evening, I came home after dark and as it was a pleasant evening, I stood in my back garden looking up at the stars. As I did so, I was aware of a slight smell of burning. The following day, one of my neighbours saw me in the street as I was setting off for work. He told me that the neighbour on the other side of the garden had set fire to mine, hoping that the flames would kill the weeds. Luckily, he had spotted the conflagration, and extinguished it before it did too much damage.
Following the neighbours’ complaints, I conceived an idea about how to deal with my lawn. I decided that I would let it grow without interference, but I would mow a narrow sinuous path along its length. The idea was that I could then explain to the neighbours that the wild grass was part of my garden design. Meanwhile, my shrubs increased in size steadily and the weeds flourished. In the warmer months of the year, whenever I strolled in my garden, clouds of butterflies used to billow from the luxuriant vegetation.
Today, in June 2023, whilst walking in Kensington Gardens, I noticed that much of the grass was growing wild – not being mowed. Here and there, the gardeners had trimmed small areas of grass with a lawnmower, much as I used to do back in Gillingham in the 1980s.
To be honest, I let my garden grow wild because I could not be bothered to spend hours of my life making it look neat and tidy. Today, what I was doing – letting the plants ‘do their own thing’ – is known as ‘wilding’. Maybe, unwittingly I was a pioneer of wilding.
