Every year we try and fail to establish a lawn. At the moment a third of the “lawn” has grass. In fact it is mainly a type of couch grass which has the advantage of remaining green in the summer with little watering. In the winter it goes a beige colour but one can live with that.
The Italians think we are trying to get an English lawn. But we’re not. We will be happy with a piece of green complete with daisies, clover and dandelions etc. Part of the problem has been the reluctance to water during the summer and to and the inability to think of an alternative. Needless to say we are not alone in this dilemma and on the internet we discovered the “no lawn” movement. In the New Yorker a couple of years ago there was a really interesting article about lawns by Elizaeth Kolbert called Turf Wars about the history and costs of maintaining lawns. It made us think.
So we have compromised and this year we have chopped off a large part of the lawn and turned it into a shrub bed. The remaining part is being reseeded and hopefully, we will not feel so guilty watering the remaining piece of green.
On Saturday we managed to get seed down in part of the new lawn. Perhaps its a good sign that since then we have had rain on Sunday and again today (Tuesday). Could this be the year for a green sward.
And of course if the seed doesn’t grow then the couch grass will slowly spread across. Then the choice may be a green lawn with couch grass in the flower beds or weed free flowerbeds with no lawn.