Monty hit back at critics of his lawn (Image: BBC Studios)
Everyone’s got an opinion on your garden, it seems, especially if you’re one of the most famous gardeners in the country. Monty Don has told how the simple act of mowing a lawn led to controversy. A few years back, Monty had called on gardeners – especially men – to abandon their “obsession” with mowing the lawn.
“Cutting grass burns lots of fossil fuel, makes a filthy noise and is about the most injurious thing you can do to wildlife,” Monty said in 2021.
“Letting grass grow…is probably the single most effective thing you can do in any garden of any size to encourage particularly insect life, but also small mammals, invertebrates, reptiles,” he added.
Monty says the change has been welcomed by his grandkids (Image: Getty)
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But now he’s had a change of heart. In the current edition of Gardeners’ World magazine, he explains that he had a trench dug in his garden to help with drainage. What was left “looked like a ploughed field,” he says, and it seemed like the perfect moment for a change of direction.
Monty levelled up the churned-up ground and seeded it with grass to create what he calls “The Long Walk,” a five-metre by 30-metre strip of land which not only serves to create a sort of “palate cleanser” between two wilder areas of garden but also serves an even more important purpose for the 69-year-old gardener.
It provides “a place for my grandchildren to play, race around and generally feel free without the precious confines of an all-singing-and-dancing television garden to inhibit them,” Monty says.
The lawn worked out exactly as he planned it, Monty says (Image: BBC / Alexandra Henderson Associates)
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But for all his planning, Monty didn’t foresee the uproar his simple strip of lawn would cause: “One camp [was] saying that I had come home to un-woke sanity (while erroneously claiming I had converted a meadow to a lawn) and the other camp saying I was betraying the moral high ground of rewilding.”
He says both arguments were “nonsense of course.”
He adds that the “long walk” worked out exactly as he hoped it would: “The grass grew, it got mown weekly, grandchildren played and, I think, it works perfectly as a green, calm space and a playground.”