Arthropedia - Love Your Lawn

As I write this, a rather wet December is coming to an end and our lawn is a sorry-looking mess covered in worm casts. Luckily, we are on very sandy soil so it will make a full recovery in spring. By high summer we will doubtless be in the grip of a typical Norfolk drought, with everything bare and parched and wishing for rain.

The garden in late July showing our flowery lawn, borders and the mini meadow in front of the dilapidated summerhouse.

A Rich List

I do like a bit of lawn: somewhere to lie and read a book or to stand barefoot on a warm day and feel the cool tickle of the grass beneath my toes (although the resident Wood Pigeons have put paid to my bare-foot wanderings with their constant mess…). But a lawn is so much more than grass.

Last summer I counted all the different plants that I could identify in a square metre of our little lawn. As well as the predominant Perennial Rye grass I found Yorkshire Fog and a type of Fescue. Flowering plants (collectively known as forbs) consisted of Dandelion, Yarrow, White Clover, Lesser Bindweed, Mouse-ear Chickweed, Common Cat’s-ear, Smooth Hawksbeard, Daisy, Dove’s-foot Cranesbill, Germander Speedwell, Wild Carrot, Common Vetch, Lesser Trefoil, Selfheal, Ribwort and Greater Plantain. So that’s a forbs list of 16 wild flowers with three species of grass.

Dandelion Delights

In spring our lawn is blessed with a fair few yellow Dandelion flowers, veritable little rays of sunshine. A meadow chock-full of these beautiful wild flowers is a wonderful sight to behold. Dandelions are one of my favourite spring flowers for as well as being bright and beautiful they are extremely important for providing pollen and nectar very early in the year when there are few other food sources available for insects just out of hibernation like bumblebees and butterflies. Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock butterflies are regular nectar-suppers, often as early in the year as February, and queen Buff-tailed Bumblebees enjoy Dandelions too. A little later, come March and April, the first solitary bees are on the wing and they spend a lot of time deep in the yellow inflorescences getting covered in copious amounts of pollen.

Peacock butterfly (left). Honeybee and *Andrena bicolor*.

*Andrena tibialis*, an uncommon species that nests in our garden (left). Male *Andrena* bee covered in pollen.

Happy In Clover

We had a few patches of White Clover when we first moved in and we used to mow around them to leave ‘magic roundabouts’ for the bees to forage on. We have increased the amount of clover in the lawn by sowing seed in any bare patches and actively scarifying the lawn in places in order to sow more. This is all to encourage one of my favourite solitary bees, the Clover Melitta (Melitta leporina). This lovely stripey bee collects pollen solely from clover flowers, mixing it with nectar to form a paste that it carries back to its nest site attached to its hind leg, very like a honeybee. In 2018, when we only had a few clover flowers we recorded our first Clover Melitta. We increased the amount of White Clover in the lawn and in 2019 we had several, both males and females.

Madame Pantaloon

Common Cat’s-ear can be a bit straggly so we tend to have it flowering around the base of the apple tree in the lawn and around the edges where we let everything grow a bit longer so it melds into the flower borders. It is well worth giving space to for it is the main flower in our garden that attracts the wonderfully-named Pantaloon Bee, Dasypoda hirtipes. The female of this bee has very long orange coloured pollen-gathering hairs on her hind legs, reminiscent of a cowboy’s chaps. The bees visit the flowers as soon as they open in the morning sunshine, rapidly flying from one to another and gathering pollen as fast as they can. The flowers often close before mid-day so the Pantaloon Bee has to make the most of her morning forage. Cat’s-ear flowers also attract various hoverflies, flies and other solitary bees.

Close-up of *Dasypoda hirtipes* showing her magnificent pollen hairs that give rise to the common name of Pantaloon Bee (left). *Dasypoda hirtipes* foraging on Common Cat’s-ear in the straggly lawn.

Hoverflies on Common Cat’s-ear: *Chrysotoxum festivum*, *Dasysyrphus albostriatus* and *Scaeva pyrastri*.

My Umbel Opinion

Another favourite wild flower is the humble Wild Carrot. It has very attractive umbels of white flowers (it used to be in the Umbelliferae but the family name has now been changed to Apiaceae). The flowers mature into beautiful structural seedheads that last through the winter and provide somewhere for little spiders to hibernate. These ‘platform’ flowerheads attract all sorts of flies, hoverflies and solitary bees and as such can be good hunting grounds for spiders such as Misumena vatia. Yarrow is another platform flower that is very attractive to a variety of insects although it is in a different family (the Asteraceae).

Hoverfly *Cheilosia caerulescens* (left) and Beetle *Rhagonycha fulva* and solitary bee *Nomada zonata*. All on Wild Carrot.

Ruby-tailed Wasp *Hedychrum* sp.(left) and Beewolf *Philanthus triangulum*. Both on Wild Carrot.

A couple of *Syrphus* sp. hoverflies enjoying nectar from Wild Carrot flowers.

Yarrow flowers with Crab Spider *Misumena vatia* (left) and Large Skipper butterfly.

So do let the grass grow under your feet and nurture the wild flowers in your lawn. Encourage it to become a straggly sward, or at least let it have unkempt edges. Enjoy the odd Dandelion or two and let clover flourish and you too can have the delight of visiting butterflies and bees through spring and summer.

The diminutive bee *Andrena labiata* is found in areas rich in Germander Speedwell, its favoured forage flower (left). Even Field Bindweed has its fans – the hoverfly *Melanostoma scalare*.

The RSPB website has some good advice on managing lawns for wildlife. I can also recommend the Wildlife Gardening Forum website for information on encouraging wildlife into your garden, and the many reason s why you should do so.