Sh*t Lawns
Our Celi chats with studio regular, Charlotte Howard, about her #TimeForTurf artifical grass campaign.
Not only the funniest and friendliest human around, Charlotte is also a highly qualified RHS Master of Horticulture, with a National Diploma in Horticulture and over two decades of experience in hands-on gardening. She designs, builds and manages gardens under her business Capability Charlotte Gardens. Capable by name and by nature, her passion for art, design and wildlife is her calling and what drives her…
Hi Charlotte, so I’ve been following your work as you campaign against the use of artificial grass and I have been blown away by how much I didn’t know, or didn’t even think to question. Can you explain as if to someone, who like me hadn’t even considered that this practice might have an impact on our environment, what it so sh*t about artificial grass?
First of all, artificial grass is a product made from fossil fuels and shipped across the world to replace a perfectly good, real lawn and soil. In laying this plastic death carpet, the vital top soil is scraped off and replaced with plastic weed membrane, several inches of crushed stone and then a sheet of plastic carpet. Studies has proven that artificial grass contributes to both urban heat island effect and urban flooding. Plastic carpet has a short lifespan. No more than ten years, less if you don’t spend a lot of time and money removing debris, brushing up the pile, cleaning it and applying weedkiller.
All the while it is shedding microplastics in to the soil, and a recent study has found a worrying amount of plastic grass microplastics in our rivers and seas. Once ingested into our blood stream it will f*ck with our endocrine system, leading to weight gain, infertility, erectile dysfunction and cancer. It prevents birds from feeding off worms and grubs and ground nesting bees from making nests. It gets very hot in the summer, making it dangerous for the paws of pets and the feet of children. It gets slippery in the winter and if you have a dog, it will reek of p*ss. Plus it costs a bleeding fortune to have laid. I did the maths, and for the price of laying your toxic turf, you could employ a gardener to mow your lawn for you for its lifespan, or buy three robo mowers.
I feel like the word sustainability has been banded around for some time now and it’s gotten a little flat. I feel like it gets used as a marketing tool to sell something that will make the purchaser feel like they are making an ethical choice when in fact they aren’t. Is this something you can speak to within the conversation of sh*t lawns?
I’m so utterly sick of companies greenwashing and the horticulture industry is a really big offender. But hand on heart if you even a have a boring bit of lawn and nothing else you are already being a million times better than if you had laid a sheet of plastic grass. Real grass, even the most monoculture of lawns, is a carbon capture absorbing heat and pollution, it absorbs rain water like a sponge slowly percolating it back into your garden to water your trees and shrubs and provides a home to millions of bugs and organisms. The soil beneath is like a micro biome as vital to out health as our own gut micro biome is.
If I had a sh*t lawn, what can I do that would be most beneficial to the environment from here, surely that plastic is just waste now? How can I justify throwing it away?
That’s a hard one because there is literally no way to recycle it, it will just go to landfill, or worse incineration. You have to make the choice, do you want it to stay in your garden poisoning your soil, or do you want it gone? Going to landfill is a better option than giving it to another garden and spreading the microplastics about. If you opt to keep it, cover it with raised beds and pots, maybe lift it and clean it and use it to carpet a shed or playhouse? If you have the crushed stone beneath, rather than send that to landfill too, you could use it as a base for gravel paths, or plant alpines in it to make a gravel garden.
Here’s one I created on a plastic grass stone base using compacted hoggin as the cover.
Describe if you will, what you see as the perfect garden and why?
I personally like a garden with lots of curves and nooks and crannies, lots of places to sit and follow the sun around the garden, packed with low maintenance perennial flowers and grasses and hardscaping kept to the bare minimum, these sorts of gardens are more interesting to be in and can provide a feeling of seclusion and privacy. A good garden should be a balance of both nature and our needs, your garden should work for you not you for it. All gardens need a bit of chaos, not be too neat, so that the detritus of life, like kids and pet’s toys and washing lines etc don’t dominate, as they would in a bland featureless garden. Smart-casual is what I call it!
What changes have you made or seen in the sh*t lawns industry since you started your campaign?
Their marketing has got more aggressive and more greenwash-y. They make claims about its water saving capacity which are untrue and also claim that it can be recycled, which technically it can be, but in practice it can’t because the one facility in Belgium only takes on pitches and is overrun. Even if it can be recycled it just kick the can down the road, it’s still bloody plastic that did not need to be built in the first place.
Ok so many people live in new builds with tiny postage stamp gardens, the soil is crap, lawns don’t grow and the kids and dogs just bring mud into the house, plastic grass is my only option, no?
No, it should never be an option, by laying this stuff over your crap soil you aren’t solving it, you are just replacing one problem with another. Far better to treat and heal the soil as you would heal your gut, spend the money and digger time you would getting plastic grass laid, to get proper French Drains put in. Then replace the top soil that was removed and flogged by the builders and add loads, and I mean loads of nice, rich mulch, (that means compost or well-rotted manure). Just leave it on the surface and the worms and other organisms will draw it down into the soil. This is called the ‘No Dig’ method. Plant trees and other deep-rooted plants and shrubs, these will help put air into the soil and absorb the water. Another thing you can do is, leave your dandelions alone. Did you know dandelions actually improve the soil and fertilise the grass? Their deep, wide-spreading roots loosen the soil and pull nutrients such as calcium from deep in the soil and makes them available to other plants. Once their job is done they disappear. After about 6 months you can then start to plant up, (yeah sorry, gardening is all about patience). While you wait, spread bark in an area for your kids/pets to play on. Or sprinkle wildflower seeds, cosmos nigella and nasturtium grow quickly and easy from seed sown direct on the ground. Wildfowers thrive on poor soil. The best time to do this is spring or autumn.
I laid wildflower turf in this new build garden, even in September when the photo was taken it was still thriving.
Then plant up some pots for instant colour. The wait will be worth it, a short-term pain for a long-term gain. You will find that now the soil will be a breeze to work with and your lawn and plants will flourish. Fun fact, perennial plants are super low maintenance, easier than a lawn and certainly easier than shrubs, you just stick them in the ground and they do their thing, looking pretty and feeding the bees and butterflies. My garden is full of flowers and is super low maintenance, it has to survive by neglect.
What next…what do you want to see?
A total ban. Or at the very least planning permission needed and a swinging waste disposal Green Levy or Tax. Then we need systemic change. Developers also need to be forced to create proper gardens behind their new-builds with drainage and decent soil. Kids need to be taught the importance of healthy soil and about gardening at school as they used to be, then they will be armed with the facts to be able to tell the plastic carpet peddlers to do one!
Thanks Charlotte!
More information about the myths around artificial grass can be found in Charlotte’s report on her website.