Day 27 · Nature

Let the lawn grow wild

Choose one corner of the lawn and stop mowing it until late summer.

A short, tidy lawn is a desert to most living things. Let a strip or a corner grow and it turns into a meadow on its own: clover, daisies, grasses going to seed, and within weeks the bees, hoverflies and butterflies that feed on them. Birds follow the insects. Pick a patch you can see from a window, mow a neat edge around it so it looks intended, and leave it. Cut it once in late summer. Then watch what turns up next spring.