Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:58 on 2023-05-10 Permalink Reply  

• Mark 09:48 on 2023-05-10 Permalink

  I went down a rabbit hole of botany discussions the other night and it was fascinating to read the diverging opinions. Some were saying that if don’t mow your lawn, then mow it, you might be damaging species that thought they could set up shop in your lawn. June comes and bam! …house destroyed. Others said that it might encourage invasive species to take hold. Others said no, it’s still beneficial. Others pointed out that no mow may started in England, and that it needs to be adapted to local growing schedules, which is what this group (Défi pissenlits) seems to be trying to do by encouraging each town to have its own timeline dependant on its climate.

  Ideally, no mow may raises awareness about the importance of preserving native habitats for pollinators. Most of the grass that we have on our lawns isn’t native. So yes, let’s remove as much lawn as possible and replace it with local flowers and plants.

• Chris 10:07 on 2023-05-10 Permalink

  Be careful what you wish for: a neighbour of mine has just decided to “don’t have a lawn at all” and now it’s replaced with astroturf. Pretty sure that’s worse. 🙂 And there are lots of places around that have asphalt, stones, or patio blocks where a lawn could be. Lawns aren’t the best, but they aren’t the worst either.

• Blork 11:53 on 2023-05-10 Permalink

  Yeah, there’s this view that a lawn is necessarily a toxic swamp of pesticides and other poisons that requires thundering gas-powered mowers to maintain them four times a week and oceans of fresh water or whatnot. While that is true in some cases, it’s not necessarily true.

  Many (most?) suburban lawns are just patches of grass, which is preferable to patches of concrete.

  Speaking for my lawn, it’s mostly clover, and barely requires watering beyond what nature provides. It gets an occasional trim from a silent electric mower (unless my friendly and bored neighbour with her 900 horsepower gas motor gets to it first). It also looks like crap for most of the year, while being rather nice and filled with bees and whatnot for a few weeks in late spring and early summer. But regardless of its looks, it provides cooling and habitat for tiny critters, unlike the gravel and concrete “lawns” that some of my neighbours have.

• qatzelok 12:33 on 2023-05-10 Permalink

  Like many city dwellers, the original owners of my apartment gave up the idea of having a lawn (in the 1800s) so that all the potential lawns could be pooled together to create large parks like Mount Royal, the Expo Islands and the waterfront bike paths in Lachine and Lasalle.

  Beats hostas, blue spruce and smoke trees any day!