With spring turning people’s minds to gardens, and gardens turning people’s minds to environmentally sustainable spaces in which bees, wild-flowers and (whisper it) weeds can flourish, Dad’s fastidiously-manicured lawn is coming under increasing scrutiny from an unlikely quarter.

Who’s pointing the green finger?

No less a personage than corduroy-clad gardening maestro Monty Don. Interviewed in the current edition of the Radio Times, the secateur-wielding broadcaster says it’s time to just let the lawn go to pot (though not actually, because that’s still broadly illegal except in the Isle of Man). “One of the things that I and people like me have been banging on about for ages is that cutting grass burns lots of fossil fuel, makes a filthy noise and is about the most injurious thing you can do to wildlife,” Don tells the magazine. “Whereas letting grass grow, which is, after all, a pretty passive thing to do, is probably the single most effective thing you can do in any garden of any size to encourage particularly insect life, but also small mammals, invertebrates, reptiles.”

It sounds like a good idea

There’s no arguing with it on environmental grounds. The buzzwords are biodiversity – of flowers, shrubs, birds, insects – and re-wilding, and the more of both that you can bring to your garden the better. Over the last year there has been a surge of interest in wildlife as people have taken an interest in their immediate surroundings and, coming against a background in which everything from wildflower tours to birdwatching are enjoying increased popularity, Don’s comments are likely to find favour. Plus it means you don’t have get the lawn mower out.

Lawns are nice though aren’t they?

They have their place – the Palace of Versailles comes to mind – and Don doesn’t contest the fact. He says he enjoys walking on a billiard table-smooth lawn in bare feet as much as the next person. It’s just that there are bigger issues in play now than keeping up with the Joneses next door. And there’s another aspect to his anti-lawn crusade which has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with what lawns say about masculinity and the masculine desire to control things.

Details?

He describes it like this: “The obsession, which tends to be male, which is controlling rather than embracing, with making a lawn that is pure grass without any filthy and foreign invading plants in there, making sure it’s stripy and neat, and — phew! — just one aspect of life that’s under control.” That, he adds, no longer “cuts the mustard”.

Are we soon to be post-lawn?

Unlikely. There are still lots of them and lots of men with petrol-driven lawn mowers who love nothing better than to run up and down them on a Sunday afternoon cutting perfect stripes. “Lawns make such easy villains because, quite simply, they can’t answer back,” says gardener and author Stephen Anderton, which in itself is hard to argue with. “Monty Don sets lawns up to knock them down in his exaggerated vision of a Britain full of immaculately striped lawns cut by men marching behind thunderous smoke-belching petrol mowers.”