Why do Kyiv residents write petitions to the KMDA, demanding that people with lawnmowers be immediately removed from city streets and parks? Why is the visual sloppiness of urban plantings considered fashionable and rational today?
In our traditional column "Likbez", the founder of the Beloded Landscaping bureau, a valid member of the Society of Garden Designers (SGD) and a member of the board of the Guild of Landscape Architects of Ukraine (GLAU), Lyudmila Bilodid outlines the pros and cons of each of these landscape techniques and the prospects for their use in our urban spaces. .
I am rich, I am respectable!
I'll start with a peaceful thesis: lawn and meadow are not antipodes, they are two full-fledged landscape techniques. But today, lawns prevail in our cities, and they are not always presentable noble parterres. Very often, our street "lawn" is a lifeless, bumpy surface with dried or dead grass.
Lyudmila Bilodid, landscape designer, director and founder of Beloded Landscaping bureau
A lawn is a marker of civilization and a symbol of wealth. Back in the Middle Ages, landlords flaunted their wealth, surrounding their palaces with hectares of empty green spaces. Thus they demonstrated that they owned a large amount of land and could afford the whim of not cultivating it. Pastures and alpine meadows are not relatives, but prototypes of a lawn, an artificially formed cover made of herbaceous plants.
English lawns, which later became a standard, appeared only at the beginning of the 1830th century. and after the invention of lawnmowers in XNUMX, they became widespread among the middle class. In the USA, the lawn has become the material embodiment of the American dream.
In the middle of the 1,5th century from the light hand of developer Abraham Levitt, founder of Levitt & Sons, the craze for lawns turned into a national mania. The ideal American lawn is an even, geometrically shaped carpet of monoculture grass, cut to a height of no more than 4 inches (about XNUMX cm). In the United States, proper lawn care is often a statutory duty of the homeowner.
Well-kept parterre lawns emphasize the status of state and cultural institutions
The Great Lawn in New York's Central Park is one of the most famous and largest lawns in the world. Its area reaches 22 hectares. The Great Lawn contains several baseball fields, a space for citizens to relax and various events and concerts. Photo: Alan Schein
Well-kept parterre lawns emphasize the status of state and cultural institutions. This is also true for private estates. An evenly trimmed lawn is not only pleasant to look at, but also convenient and safe to use.
In Western culture and in Ukraine, people consider the lawn to be an essential element of the urban landscape, but for us, uncut grass remains a symbol of the neighborhood: "I will get off at the far station, grass up to my waist." And until recently, no one questioned the social, symbolic and aesthetic value of lawns.
Let's go wild, let's go wild
Simultaneously with the trends towards a simpler and more natural way of life in Europe and America, the movement to naturalize the urban landscape is gaining momentum. The mass fashion for wild gardens and parks began in 1985, when landscape architect and naturalist Chris Baines presented the Wildlife Garden project at the international flower exhibition in Chelsea, London.
Back in the 80s, Bains created the Urban Wildlife Group, starting a movement for wildlife in cities. His books, TV programs and documentaries have inspired British people to change their approach to urban gardening. New and new landscape compositions with wild meadow grasses appear at the annual flower show in Chelsea and receive a powerful emotional response from the public.
In Great Britain, when talking about urban landscaping, the expression Nature in the City is increasingly used
Activists of the naturalist trend call for abandoning the practice of frequent mowing of the grass and replacing expensive parterre lawns with flowering lawns made of undemanding perennials. There are many arguments in favor of such a decision. Lawns are, as we have already said, an expensive pleasure. And it's one thing when a commercial corporation or a private owner pays for such pleasure, and quite another when it's taxpayer money.
English natural meadows became the prototype of urban lawns. Photo source: pxhere.com
The ecological component is also important. For example, in the US, 23% of all urban areas are covered with lawns, which is roughly the size of the state of Texas. A total of $30 billion a year is spent on American lawn care. Annually, 62 tons of pesticides are used to control weeds. And it takes almost 000 liters of water per day to water one standard home lawn in the arid climate of California!
Loud gasoline lawnmowers also pollute the atmosphere. It is obvious that all this is a serious burden on the environment. Unfortunately, it is not known how much is spent on maintaining lawns in Ukraine, as such studies have not been conducted in our country.
Another claim against lawns: they depersonalize our cities, depriving them of authenticity. No matter where you are on the planet, lawns are the same everywhere. This is an impersonal green space, devoid of local expressiveness. In China, after the Cultural Revolution of 1965, the lawns that arose there under the influence of American and British traditions tried to destroy and survive as an anomaly that contradicted the aesthetic principles of the Chinese garden. But today this international element of the landscape has returned to Chinese metropolises.
Lawns (regular, not parterre) are undoubtedly functional, because they allow us to comfortably spend our leisure time in the summer. But by and large, they practically do not perform any useful ecological function. Yes, they prevent soil erosion and drain rainwater, but compared to meadow, they are less effective in this regard.
Postcard advertising the Charter Oak lawnmower, one of the first drum-type models that revolutionized lawn history, 1870. Image credit: digitalcommonwealth.org
Lawns do not follow the trend of sustainability, they are not capable of self-healing and do not support biodiversity. In this aspect, a man-made grass monoculture lawn can be considered the antithesis of a natural ecosystem.
Certainly, a lawn of any quality is better than pavers or paved space. But if we accept the global trends of sustainability, then lawns should give up part of the territory to natural and pseudo-natural biotopes.
Nature in the city
An ideal lawn can be compared to a desert. But as soon as we leave uncut areas of grass, life appears there: bird nests, insects, small animals. Whole groups occur in thickets of grass.
How to assess the biodiversity of a garden or park and why is it important? According to Jennifer Owen, Ph.D. of the University of Michigan, a marker of biodiversity is not only the number of plant species, but also how much they attract pollinating insects, which are perhaps the most important link in the ecological chain.
For 30 years, Jennifer Owen observed her own garden and kept statistics on which plants attract insects, and in 1991 she published the book "Garden Ecology". Her garden, in which 474 species of plants grew, became home to 1997 species of insects and 64 species of vertebrates, mostly birds. Today, these numbers are considered the lower limit in assessing the sustainability of artificially created landscape biotopes.
The attractiveness of a plant to pollinating insects is a marker of biodiversity
In Great Britain, the expression Nature in the City is increasingly used when talking about urban landscaping. Nature in the city is not only a green background for architecture, well-kept parks and flower beds that are comfortable for people. This is a kind of call to supplement the urban fabric with oases for insects, birds and other fauna.
Flowering meadows along the driveways at Whittington Park Meadow. The "Flower River" on the northern outskirts of London was implemented on the initiative of the popularizer of the naturalist movement, Catherine Lwin. Photo source: River of Flowers
Today, Great Britain is a world leader in the movement to create wilderness areas in cities, and not only on the outskirts, but also in prestigious public locations, such as the London Olympic Park and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Caring for bees and other pollinating insects today is an important component of almost any landscape project, whether it is about parks, street curbs, residential areas, or green roofs. And this is at the same time that every fifth inhabitant of the country suffers from seasonal allergic rhinitis!
The problem of the coexistence of people and wild plantations is not kept silent: it is discussed at various levels in search of compromises. The assortment of grasses and the location of meadows are discussed - for example, it is obvious that tall grasses should not be left near children's facilities or hospitals. But the very fact that it is necessary to create natural oases in cities, functionally designed to support biodiversity and ecological well-being, cannot be doubted.
In addition, according to the American researcher and gardener Tom Ogren, the main cause of seasonal allergy attacks in townspeople is not flowers and grass, but trees, and this is the result of many years of "botanical sexism", when mainly male seedlings of dioecious trees are used in the landscaping of settlements and bushes that emit pollen. Tom Ogren is the founder of Allergy-Free Gardening, and his practical guides have lots of useful tips on how to make urban gardens as safe as possible.
Wildflowers prefer poor soils: the roadside, a wasteland or wasteland - that's what you need!
Flowering pseudomeadows or naturalized plantings are not only fashionable and ecological, but also economically justified. You can save not only on labor force, equipment, water. This is also an opportunity to save on fertilizers: perennial wildflowers, unlike decorative crops, prefer infertile, poor soils. That's why you don't need to order fertile soil to arrange a city meadow, on the contrary, a post-industrial area, a roadside, a wasteland or a wasteland is exactly what you need!
Myth: "You just need to stop mowing!"
There is no universal strategy for reproducing islands of wild nature in cities. Much depends on the local climatic conditions, the nature of the environment and the budgets that the townspeople are willing to spend on such purposes. But this does not mean that we have to reinvent the wheel: our European, American, Canadian, Australian colleagues who are responsible for landscaping have developed agrotechnical rules, norms and recommendations that should be taken as a basis and adapted.
There are composed mixes of seeds for liming, intended for different soils, different functional and anthropogenic loads, in particular for such extreme areas as roadsides.
It is a mistake to think that if the lawn is simply stopped mowing, it will turn into a blooming meadow.
We will get green clumps, with bare soil in the gaps between them, where invasive and dangerous weeds - like ragweed, for example - will happily settle. This area will be completely wild, but devoid of any aesthetic value. That is, it will become a blind spot in the urban landscape.
Care of city meadows is carried out with the help of special mowers with intelligent control and the ability to adjust the mowing height. Photo source: wildflowerturf.co.uk
There are several options for gradually liming the lawn. One of them is to gradually, year by year, reduce the number of kosovos and bring them to twice a season. At the same time, it is necessary to regulate the number of unwanted weeds. After a few years, the lawn will turn into a semi-natural meadow - hardly blooming profusely, but already more stable and more pleasing to the eye.
Another way: you need to stop applying fertilizers and mow the grass low very often during the season, at least weekly, to weaken it, and in the fall, sow wildflower seeds directly on top of the lawn mowed to zero. In the next few years, it will be necessary to sow and mow according to a special schedule.
The seeds of endemic weeds remain viable in the upper layers of the soil for up to 70 years. This is a kind of "life bank" created by nature. And measures such as digging stimulate the growth of primarily aggressive endemic weeds. Therefore, field grasses are either sown very shallowly, scratching the turf, or act radically. Before sowing, the planting site is prepared by removing a 10-centimeter layer of soil, and even herbicides are used to eliminate the dominance of weeds.
In the future, a mowing schedule must be followed to suppress grasses and encourage wildflowers. There is another agrotechnical trick: for a quick result, you can sow an annual plant that displaces lawn grasses: small bellflower (lat. Rhinanthus minor). As you can see, creating an urban meadow also requires knowledge and skills.
Meadow care involves a special mowing schedule that suppresses grasses and stimulates the development of flowers
If we are dealing with an area of natural meadow cover that miraculously survived in the city, then there is a way to increase its decorativeness without harming the ecosystem. European gardeners actively practice such an agrotechnical technique as the insertion of cultural perennials into natural groups.
That is, it is not necessary and even contraindicated to remove the entire layer of wild natural vegetation and dig up the entire area - you can point-wise integrate cultural inserts into it, creating a kind of flower patch. The main goal is to minimize interference with the natural environment, while achieving a decorative effect.
Management and planning: pitfalls
City restored or preserved meadows are more sustainable in the long term and will significantly save us the city budget. This will not happen instantly and only under the condition of competent care and management. If we want to increase the share of natural meadows in cities, it is necessary to do it correctly.
I predict that we will have problems with this, since today's utility workers do not have the personnel resources to perform even such traditional tasks as tree trimming. Recently, a meeting was held in "Kyivzelenbud" with the participation of people's deputies and specialized specialists.
And even a superficial audit of the issues of care for green spaces revealed that in the ZHEKs, which are responsible for the care of adjacent territories, it turns out that not only are there no specialist arborists, they are basically not familiar with the elementary rules of pruning and crowning. Unqualified people are involved in the work, who destroy, mutilate and disfigure trees. However, townspeople have similar claims not only to ZHEKs, but also to green buildings.
Recently, Kyiv residents posted a petition on the KMDA website, demanding to shorten the lawn mowing schedule and proceed to their naturalization. Despite the fact that sedges should stimulate the development of lawn grasses, in our reality everything happens exactly the opposite. Despite the outwardly intended "care" and hundreds of active workers with lawnmowers who smoke, the lawns turn yellow, wither, in the spring they are dug up and re-sown.
The head of the municipal association "Kyivzelenbud" Oleksiy Korol has already given a comment to the capital's mass media, in which he emphasized that meadow biotopes are not very aesthetic, and blooming, so-called Moorish lawns are very impractical! They, it turns out (!), need professional care. Therefore, today it is easier for our gardeners not to change anything. As Shakespeare said: "It is better to put up with a familiar evil than to flee at random into the unknown."
Also, Oleksii Korol names as a significant drawback exactly what is considered the main advantage of meadows all over the world: flowers attract pollinating insects, honey bees, wasps and bumblebees.
Barbican Beech Gardens are naturalistic gardens in London created using ZinCo's "Roof Garden" technology. The landscape architect is Nigel Dunnett. Photo source: zinco-greenroof.com
Paradox: since 2001, the world celebrates the International Day of Biological Diversity on May 22, and in Ukraine, people who are responsible for political and urban decisions still think according to the patterns of the middle of the XNUMXth century, when the progressive anthropogenic impact of man on the environment was considered a proof of civilizational success . Sadly.
However, it is not only the rigidity of city utility services that slows down traffic. If a mass survey were to be conducted today, I am sure that the majority of residents would be in favor of traditional lawns. Mass demand for natural vegetation in the city has not yet formed in society. As soon as the lawn is established, people already perceive it as unkempt and do not accept the aesthetics of naturalistic gardening.
Yes, the opinion of the British has changed a lot in 40 years of fascination with the naturalization of gardens, and they live in a completely different paradigm, while in our society these changes are just beginning. We are just beginning to realize that our cities need nature reserves, areas of wild vegetation outside, however ragged or yellowed in the off-season.
Plants must be allowed to go through a complete life cycle from germination to complete wilting and composting. But so far, most Ukrainians support the opinion of Francis Bacon, who believed that "there is nothing more pleasing to the eye than low-cut green grass."
In dynamics
The topic of ecological nature like plantings is also interesting because it is the subject of a heated discussion among urban planners and landscape architects. Back in the late 90s, landscape authorities Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmow articulated the difference between naturalistic planting and ecological landscaping.
First are pseudo-meadows, such as in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which have a natural appearance, but are static (remaining within the original project) and require quite a lot of care in terms of resources.
Second is a dynamic ecosystem in which plants reproduce, grow, die and self-renew under conditions of minimal human intervention. The first is a tight fit, the second is what can best be described by the word "overgrowth".
The next decade was declared by the United Nations as the decade of ecosystem restoration
In the wild, the density of species on one square meter reaches dozens, and the density limit for naturalistic planting is 5–9 plants. Today, there is an active scientific search for balanced plant mixes to create sustainable and at the same time decorative ecosystems. Pete Udolph came the closest to this. In his private garden in Hummelo, he can safely carry out risky garden experiments. However, when he designs prairie gardens for urban landscapes, he tries to make them manageable, predictable, and user-friendly.
Behind the external "wildness" are careful planning, thoughtfulness in details and specialized care. "I'm just trying to turn our shared fantasies into reality," is how Piet Udolf comments on his new project - the garden in front of the Vitra design museum in Wiley am Rhein, Germany.
No one suggests that the townspeople make their way through thickets of thistles. For example, in the Royal Gardens of Kew, the walking area from the pagoda to the main entrance is a mowed meadow surrounded by tall grass on both sides. You can comfortably walk along such a path, in particular, you can move around in wheelchairs. In short, many optimal landscape solutions have already been developed.
Our desire to regulate natural processes is completely organic, since it is human nature to order chaos.
But at the same time, we humans, by nature, are experimenters who strive to create something new, in particular, to combine decorative and wild cultures, achieving a new aesthetic effect. By creating alternative plant communities, we will not be giving up sports turf or cut grass in public parks on which to sit and lie. And despite the fact that Ukraine is a small country, it will be quite appropriate to emphasize important objects and architecture with state-of-the-art parterre lawns.
The blooming poppy meadow in Pyrogovo is one of the few islands of natural nature within the city limits of Kyiv. Photo: Andriy Vyetoshkin
Yes, the lawn is pleasant to look at. But it is important to remember that bees, birds and many other representatives of flora and fauna have a right to our planet. We should not oppose formats and break spears in endless arguments and discussions, but should strive for a reasonable compromise. Lawns remain a favorite even for purveyors of naturalistic gardens, for example in French modern landscape design, lush thickets of wild perennials are combined with perfectly manicured lawns and topiaries (Le Jardin de Berchigranges).
Similar techniques are practiced in the urban greening of Northern European cities.
Therefore, it is time to move from controversy to critical analysis of the situation and to a new paradigm of planning, design and management. Given the urgent needs of people, it should not be forgotten that the next decade has been declared by the United Nations as the decade of ecosystem restoration.
