Two years ago, the landscaping practice called No Mow May emerged on the scene among ecologically minded gardeners in the U.S. Originating in Britain, the concept is simple: don’t mow your lawn for the month of May, giving non-grass plants in your lawn like clover, violets, and dandelions a chance to flower, providing early season food for bees and other pollinators emerging from winter hibernation.

Massachusetts has 400 species of native bees and hundreds of other insect pollinators, many of them in decline due to development, pesticides, climate change, and other factors. We take these pollinators for granted, but they serve a vital role in our lives – they pollinate the food plants that produce 1/3 of all of our food, and 80% of all flowering plants on earth. Without them, our ecosystems would collapse.

What happens when you don’t mow in May? Researchers in Appleton, Wisconsin found that participating yards had three times the number of bee species and five times the number of bees as regularly mown parks nearby.

Two years ago Lexington Living Landscapes, the local volunteer initiative advocating for more sustainable landscaping practices, promoted No Mow May here in town. What we learned is that it works better under some circumstances than others. If your lawn is a uniform carpet of turf grasses, all you get is very tall grass. But if you already have a number of other plants, allowing them to flower can be a boon to local bee populations.

No Mow May isn’t a panacea, but a gateway to more ecologically sensitive use of our yards. America has more than 40 million acres of lawn, mostly non-native turf grasses with little or no wildlife value. Conservation isn’t just about saving other places; there are many meaningful things homeowners can do to protect biodiversity and provide wildlife habitat right here in town. Mowing less often through the season, reducing the size of your lawn and replacing some of it with native groundcovers and other native plants, doing without pesticides, leaving the leaves in flower beds to provide habitat for overwintering insects – all of these will help our pollinators thrive.

People are eager to make a difference. One place we can is our own lawns and gardens.
To learn more about what you can do, visit the Lexington Living Landscapes website.

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