No Mow May - identifying flowering plants

27 Aug

Not mowing our lawn to an inch of its life is something that we’ve always done. Smooth green lawn might be nice to look at but it’s nothing but a glorified biodiversity desert.

A few years ago we received complaints from (anonymous) neighbours requesting that we “tidy up our garden”. To us, providing a safe haven for wildlife will always be more important than conforming so we haven’t and we won’t. We keep it relatively tidy but refuse to get rid of the variety of plants on it.

While it was always obvious that we have a lot of flowers in our tiny garden, this year we were interested just what species our front garden harbors.

I downloaded a plant identifying app and we hunted for plants in the lawn that weren’t grass. We identified 24 different types of flowering plants in our 10-15m2 front garden! Six of these were planted by us: alpenrose, alpine rose, japanese spirea, opium poppy, purple sprouting broccoli and snapdragon. The rest grew there without our input, apart from us letting them grow.

We were proud to learn that our little front garden attracted the following species:

Barley

Common columbine

Common daisy

Common mouse ear

Common speedwell

Creeping buttercup

Dandelion

Herb robert

Lesser knapweed

Oxeye daisy

Poverty brome