This document promotes the idea of "No Mow May" and rewilding lawns to support biodiversity. It provides reasons for allowing lawns to grow wild in May such as providing food and habitat for insects, birds, and other wildlife. Not mowing allows native plants to grow and flowers to bloom, attracting more species. Monocultures in lawns are criticized for lacking diversity and attracting pests, while polycultures are praised for their resilience. Quotes from various sources further explain the benefits of natural landscapes and meadows over conventional lawns in terms of supporting the web of life.
7. And
humans wonder
why they need to rent
travelling
beehives.
monocultures are
the hallmark of what’s wrong
in agriculture today… Nature loves
the symbiosis of many different
species — microbial, plant, animal —
all living together, one
benefitting from the other.
~Farmer Will Harris
George Steinmetz, National Geographic
8. ❤ A life without animals is not worth living❤ , Pixabay
[a lawn] is authoritarian.
Under the mower's brutal
indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is
subdued, homogenized, dominated
utterly.
~Michael Pollan, Why Mow
Please don’t
mow!
9. Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Biodiversity—diversity within
species, between species & of
ecosystems—is declining faster
than at any time in human history
~Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity &
Ecosystem Services, 2019, IPBES
10.
11. Nicholas Erwin, Flickr
yellow-
banded bumblebee
American bumblebee
yellow bumblebee
cuckoo bumblebee
rusty patched bumblebee
About a third of Toronto’s native
bees have drastically declined
or disappeared
22. [biodiversity is the]
wondrous, teeming, calamitously
threatened variety and variability of
life on earth, sometimes measured by
species richness.
~Robert McFarlane
23. That gifts that were
being offered was evident in
the general hum and flutter of
insect life. The meadow was audible
with bees and crickets; the mowed grass
was silent. The meadow waved and
nodded in the wind; crowds of
leafhoppers leapt to the brush of a
hand. The lawn was deadly still.
~Sara Stein, Noah’s Garden
24. What we need
now is to
deeply love the
wild earth
Photo by Bob Travis on Flickr
25. v
I can make a
difference. I can manage
[rewild my lawn] in a way that
contributes to the ecological
fabric of the city and the life
of a city.
~Dr. Carly Ziter
26. No Mow May
homes had three times
higher bee richness and
five times higher bee
abundances.
~Appleton
35. A landscape is a
multispecies
gathering in the
making.
~Kenneth Olwig
A landscape isn’t
just backdrop or
scenery.
36. Andras Vas, Unsplash
I am
landscape
When we look deeply into the leaf,
we can see many things. We can see the
plant, we can see the sunshine, we can
see the clouds, we can see the earth.
When we utter the word “leaf”, we have
to be aware that a leaf is made of non-
leaf elements. If we remove the non-
leaf elements, such as the sunshine, the
clouds, and the soil, there will be no
leaf left.
~Thich Nhat Hanh
37. Human body is a
multiplicity that doesn’t
end at the skin.
~Thich Nhat Hanh
I am
landscape
Illustration by bedelgeuse.tumblr.com
38. We’re all—trees, humans,
insects, birds, bacteria—
pluralities. Life is embodied network... where
ecological & evolutionary tensions between
cooperation and conflict are negotiated & resolved.
These struggles often result not in the evolution of
stronger, more disconnected selves but in the
dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is
network, there is no “nature” or “environment,”
separate & apart from humans. We are part of the
community of life, composed of relationships
with “others.”
~David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees
BBC
41. We’re in the Manitoulin-Lake
Simcoe Ecoregion of the Mixedwood
Plains Ecozone. Before colonization, this land
was 90% forest. The Mixedwood Plains supported a
greater diversity of trees and plants than any
other part of Canada. Now only 17-20% of
Indigenous forests remain, mostly in
wetlands.
42. The idea of lawns
being somehow compulsory is
a largely British idea, passed on
like a raging infection to
certain of the colonies.
~Noel Kingsbury
z
Stuart Yeates, Flickr
43. International Boreal Conservation Science Panel
Over half of the 690
species of concern in Ontario
use habitat in southern
Ontario forests
44. Photo by Jim Williams
forests are home to 80%
of the world’s terrestrial
biodiversity.
We need
more forests!
56. Jill Wellington, Pixabay
Before manicured
lawns, with their chemicals,
mowers, and blowers, there were
ecological meadows, with their
butterflies, birds, and bees.
~Penny Lewis, Ecological Landscaping
Association
62. Bee lawn at Kenwood Park in Minneapolis. Rachel Urick/University of Minnesota Bee Lab
Tell your
neighbours
you’re growing a
bee lawn
63. Better yet, tell them
you’re supporting multispecies
resurgence!
64. My imperfect lawn… is the
floor, and the causeway to get around
in my landscape. It stops erosion and slows
rainwater, allowing infiltration, cleaning
and restoring water to deeper soils and
eventually to aquifers.
~Carol Reese
65. In an organic yard,
Fernando takes a decaying blade of
grass down in his burrow and munches on
it "These things are my favorite!" says
Fernando. "I need some more!" Back at the surface,
Fernando finds some home made compost "What is
this? Oh my! This is my new favorite!
(munch munch) It's so good! (munch munch) How
can this be crunchy and chewy AT THE SAME TIME!
Oof, I'm so full. I wanna have sex and have lots
of babies so they can enjoy the crunchy
chewy stuff.”
~Paul Wheaton
Organic lawn care for the cheap and lazy, Paul Wheaton
67. Mowing Lawn Turf, MSU State Extension & University of Nevada Cooperative Extension & Organic lawn care for the cheap and lazy, Paul Wheaton
68. New England Wildflower Society
Got shade?
Pennsylvania sedge feeds
up to three dozen species of
caterpillars
69. Barren strawberry (Waldstenia fragarioides) Mt. Cuba Center
this is may be the answer
to the persistent question about
evergreen native ground covers.
EVERYONE is looking for that native
alternative to pachysandra, vinca and
English Ivy. This, my friends, may
be what you are looking for.
~James Brown, New Moon Nursery
72. A weed is a plant
that’s mastered every
survival skill except for
learning how to grow in
rows.
~Doug Larson
73. Get to
know our
stories.
plantago lanceolata
(Oginii-waabigwaniin) was
considered one of the nine
sacred herbs of the ancient
Saxons.
Gardens All
74. Ron Guest Field of Hope, Flickr
What is this being
telling me?
What are ways I can listen?
Who are you?
Why are you here?
What have you brought us? Let’s get to know you and what
you're bringing.
What do you need?
What are your relationships? Who is your family?
How do you fit in?
Who do you dream of becoming?
~Modified from Robin Wall Kimmerer
81. Colleen Codekas, Grow Forage Cook Ferment
When I see a yard full of
weeds, it says to me, it’s a vibrant
yard… there’s more food growing where
people don’t ‘groom’ their yards with
chemicals
~UC Berkeley Professor Philip Stark
82. Try eating
your salad from
the sidewalk.
~Mark Bittman
Salad From the Sidewalk by Philip B. Stark, NY Times
84. NY State IPM Program at Cornell University, Flickr
it is seldom the
rare, exotic, and beautiful
plant that proves the most
interesting, more often it is some
common, familiar, and despised weed
that is discovered to have
undreamed-of virtues.
~Euell Gibbons
85. Lori Carlson, Flickr
nectar of creeping charlie attracts
long-tongued bees primarily, including
honeybees, bumblebees, mason bees, a cuckoo
bee, a long-horned bee, an Anthophorine bee, and
small carpenter bees. Occasionally, the flowers
attract green metallic bees, bee flies, a Syrphid fly,
Sulfur and White butterflies, and skippers.
caterpillars of a polyphagous moth feed on the
foliage of Ground Ivy, while the larvae of Ground
Ivy Gall Wasp form galls on the stems,
petioles, or leaves.
~Illinois Wildflowers
88. No one needs a
surgeon who keep
Prunelle
~French proverb
Early settlers
called it “heart of
the Earth”
Ingijibinaa
Ogijibinaan
Very Great, Drawing Out One,
The Great Drawer-Outer
89. Wildness
matters more now than it ever
has. We’re urbanizing at a pace
unprecedented in human history… We have
to look at the landscapes we live in as
places where nature could be
[multispecies refugia].
~Thomas Rainer
93. [Landscape] need
not be understood as being
either territory or scenery; it can
also be conceived as a nexus of
community, justice, nature, and
environmental equity, a
contested territory.
~Kenneth Olwig
Tiny Forest Science Park, Utrechtse Biologen Vereniging
94. Think of
rewilding as an
embodied land
acknowledgement
supporting multispecies
resurgence.
Celebrate
no mow May by
rewilding your
lawn.