War on the lawn! Why do we not replace all grass fields without a function in flower meadows?

An effect of traveling is that when you return, you look at your own environment in a different way. What has struck me is our Western fascination for grass.

You probably know them, those to the millimeter perfect blades of grass, the lawn of your dreams.

It has become so common that it has become the norm. One sees a spontaneous flower popping up and then grabs a Bayer sprayer to remove it quickly, because it has to be right. If we only thought about our lawn in this way, okay, but no. We have evolved into a society in which obsessive compulsive behavior has become a normality. Everything in sacks and shoeboxes, straight, optima forma, done, flawless. We live in a constant hell, have to perform perfectly and take into account thousands of rules, written and unwritten, we are then surprised that we get depressed or get a burn-out.

During the Victorian era the super-rich wondered how they could best display their wealth. Every square meter was used to grow food, so land was very scarce. They found nothing better than to use large pieces of land as a lawn. This showed that they were rolling in money, because they could own valuable land without using it as building or agricultural land. It was maintained by many servants, usually with a scythe, sometimes even with scissors. In 1830, the first lawn mower was invented and now we have those wonderful grass robots.

A lawn is the most unnatural state in which you can find a garden, it is a green desert. In nature there is such a thing as succession. On rocks, there are mosses that break down the rock, on which small plants can grow that each time, with their roots and with dead plant material, make a deeper and richer soil. Little by little, larger and larger plants can settle until trees grow over time. In almost all climate types, a forest is the climax vegetation (except in steppes or savannas, because of too much drought).

Because we stop the natural succession (grass wants to become forest), we become slaves of our lawn. According to experts, we should mow it every seven to ten days, for more than half a year, that is at least twenty to thirty times.

A lawn is great, I'm not going to discuss that. Children love it, it is the best place to play football, to make love or to have a cozy barbecue. I do not know how it is in other countries, but the extent to which we, as Belgians, have lawns, which we only enter to mow, is far too big.

The era of grass is passé. Why not replace all grass fields without function in flower meadows? They provide a symphonic color spectacle and attract beautiful birds and bees. You also only have to mow that meadow twice a year. I think that would liven things up a bit more, instead of that boring monotone green?