In his book, Lawn People, the academic Paul Robbins explores the moral dimensions of lawns, arguing that the social pressure to maintain an immaculate swathe of mown garden has led to our lawns controlling us, rather than the other way around. Since then, clipped grass has spread inexorably across the globe from California to China, with an aesthetic that extends far beyond landscaping. That uniquely British horticultural artefact, the greensward, reached its apotheosis in the 18th century, when great landscape designers such as William Kent and Capability Brown incorporated it into their vision of English pastoral. The charity Plantlife is encouraging gardeners to “liberate the lawn” by allowing wild plants and pollinators to flourish by relinquishing the lawnmower for the duration of “No Mow May”. But now the value of those overlooked weeds is once again recognised.

Around this time of year at my village primary school we used to pipe up a bucolic hymn: “Daisies are our silver,/ Buttercups our gold:/ This is all the treasure/ We can have or hold.” Written by Jan Struther, the creator of the popular wartime heroine, Mrs Miniver, the hymn is a jewelled evocation of the humble virtues of wild flowers, often regarded by gardeners as weeds.Īs my generation of schoolchildren began our careers, the idea of wild flowers as the only wealth we might aspire to became increasingly unfashionable.

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