What Is No Mow May?
A Way To Help Insects, Flowers and Wildlife That’s As easy As Doing Nothing!
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It’s ‘No Mow May’ and you’re invited to join in. But before you say you’re too busy and you haven’t got the time or the energy, relax… you literally don’t have to do anything.
No Mow May is an annual campaign by UK wild flower charity, Plantlife, which encourages us all to leave the lawn mower in the shed during the whole of this month, allowing our native flowers, insects and wildlife space to do their thing.
The results on a personal level, as my own experience will testify, can be amazing. Multiplied across thousands or even millions of gardens, parks and fields around the entire British Isles and beyond, the results have the potential to be game-changing.
It’s well-known that Britain’s bees are in decline, largely as a result of habitat loss, changes in land use, urban sprawl and modern farming methods. It’s not just bees, either —numbers of butterflies, hoverflies and others have all plummeted in the last 50 years or so.
According to the charity Buglife (The Invertebrate Conservation Trust) over 97% of England’s grasslands have been lost since the 1930s, a pattern which is reflected across other parts of the British Isles and, I suspect, many other parts of the world.
Even those few surviving areas with a thriving ecosystem are disjointed and separated by what amounts to, from a insect’s viewpoint, inhospitable wastelands, meaning that as climate and environment changes, wildlife is unable to migrate to pastures new and often dies out.
‘If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world’s ecosystems would collapse.’
— Sir David Attenborough
It’s not just the concrete wastelands of urban and industrial sprawl which are the problem, or the inhospitable monocrops of modern agriculture. It’s also the so-called ‘green concrete’ of barren, closely-cropped, weed-free lawns which are neither…