As arguably the country’s finest community of clever people (sorry, Oxford), the bright minds over at Cambridge University are always thinking up ways to change things for the better. Their latest big experiment? Well, that’d be not mowing the lawn outside King’s College! What are they like, eh?
The idea behind Cambridge Uni’s project – part of the ‘No-Mow May’ movement – was to turn the King’s lawn into a wildflower meadow. The five-year project began back in 2020, which marked the first time since 1772 that the lawn hadn’t been mowed.
The project, which covers an area about half the size of a football pitch, also involved planting wildflowers. The eventual end goal was to see if having wildflower meadow would have an impact on local biodiversity and greenhouse-gas emissions.
And now the results are in. A recently published report revealed that biodiversity increased massively: more than three times as many species of plants, spiders and bugs currently inhabit the field compared with back when it was a lawn. It had a huge impact on local greenhouse-gas emissions, too, apparently saving a whopping 1.36 tonnes of carbon emissions per hectare per year.
Better yet, the field also looks really pretty, with poppies, cornflowers and oxeye daisies now found growing in it. Here are a few pics that show the King’s College lawn in all its un-mowed glory.
All in all, King’s College makes a pretty good case for turning all lawns to wildflower meadows. If you’d like to find out more about the meadow, you can read the full academic report on it for yourself here.
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