I’ve just got back from a long overdue trip away visiting friends and family in London and Edinburgh to find summer has finally arrived in Morvern and along with it an abundance of growth on the croft. The Polycrub is heaving with ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, baby pumpkins and fresh basil; the freezer is full blackcurrants, strawberries and gooseberries that Alasdair has harvested while I have been away and there is noticeable growth on both the fruit trees around the house and the oak, birch, hazel, rowan and willow saplings now growing all around the croft.
Interestingly despite all of this, all I saw was an overgrown lawn. It filled me with an irrational fear; after years of always mowing the lawn (and seemingly enjoying the job) was Alasdair now letting things slide? Was this just the beginning? Would he ever mow the lawn again? Did he have too much other work? He had hurt his back quite badly before we went away – were we too old to manage the croft? Would everything end up in rack and ruin?
The truth is our lawn is still recovering from a year being used as a builder’s yard for mixing cement and storing materials and lived on by our builders in a caravan. It wasn’t until late spring we realised that, despite many promises, the builders probably weren’t coming back to clear it, and so we moved the twenty bags of hardened cement, scaffolding poles and disintegrating plasterboard ourselves. We then found that the lawnmower charger was missing (possibly amongst the stuff the builders had taken from inside the house).
In the face of all this, at some point while I was away, unbeknown to me, Alasdair had taken an executive decision to let the lawn rest this year and start again next spring once it had recovered. But perception is everything when it comes to land management and to me it looked and felt bad – like we didn’t care.
It turns out this is not just a problem in the Rhemore household. Given that we are surrounded by 100 acres of croft land, letting our lawn grow long for no mow May (and June and July) is not going to bring a huge amount of environmental uplift. But in an urban environment even small pockets of wildland can make a big difference for insects, bees and butterflies – all of which are an important part of the food chain and pollinate crops. Since the Second World War, in the UK we have become used to seeing every patch of land utilised and ‘properly” managed and culturally we struggle to distinguish between intentionally leaving things be, say for a butterfly haven, and what looks like neglect, lack of care or untidiness.
In the mid-nineties a clever woman (and architecture professor) called Joan Nassauer came up with the concept of “cues to care” after her research showed people find land that has been left to grow wild for ecological reasons more acceptable if there is at least one mechanism that conveys a caring human intention or presence. For example, mowing a neat border or a path through or around a wild area.
Being in nature makes people feel good – but the underlying sense of safety, security and order that a sense of management and care can give, may be just as important. People want, or perhaps even need, to feel things are being looked after.
Having had periods in my early life that were particularly chaotic I sometimes wonder if I am more attuned to this than most. I can be quite messy though, which somewhat undermines this theory.
Suffice to say, once we have replaced the charger for the mower, which ironically I might have given to the builders in a box of what I thought was their possessions, Alasdair will be mowing me a nice border around our wild lawn and a small area for putting down a rug. I can then sit and admire the chaotic wildness of our croft. And I will try to trust that nature has its own intended order, even if I can’t perceive it, and may not ever fully understand it.
Leave a Reply