Well, look what just appened in London with not cutting the verges??
Set the bloody place on fire didnt it !!
Donkeyman! 
Did it ?
I donāt think itās got anything to do with the verges at all .
Thatās where a lot of fires start, set off by people throwing cigarette butts out of the car window.
yes but donāt ya see Muddy is right really - it hasnāt got anything to do with verges - they stand there innocently waving in the breeze and you are right Bruce too - it;s about people throwing fags out of passing cars perhaps? the verges are innocent bystanders??
Anyone who throws a cigarette butt out of a window onto tinder dry grass is a criminal itās tantamount to arson . However people who kill their own bodies by smoking a poisonous substance are not likely to consider this .
I think there are a much higher percentage of smokers in the UK than here too. At the moment you could chuck a burning, petrol soaked rag out the window without any worry of it starting a fire so roles are reversed at the moment.
throwing anything out of car windows is most annoying!
People are so filthy !
They seem to think itās any easy way to clean the insider of their cars .
They need to be sentenced to a chain gang that cleans out the verges and ditches of drink cans and other crap .
I have spent the last few years allowing and encouraging wild flowers to establish themselves in my front lawn.
I mow a strip around the edge, so the grasses and weeds donāt grow into the paving stones of the paths but leave the middle part unmowed in Spring and mowed only on the highest setting after the plants have flowered and seeded, to encourage some of the low growing food providers for insects.
Before I left home for a long holiday in May, I made sure I left the lawn as tidy as possible, without disturbing the low growing patches of wildflowers which are beginning to establish themselves in the lawn now, including some lovely big patches of white clover, which always attract the bees.
I heard about the hot weather in UK while I was away, so didnāt think the grass in the lawn would be too high when I returned after 6 weeks - I try not to mow the lawn in hot dry spells anyway.
When I did return home, I was so disappointed to discover the lawn had been mowed really short and everything growing in it was brown and dying - even the grass had gone all brown.
My neighbour knew I was away, so he thought it would be neighbourly to mow my lawn when he mowed his own - he mowed it on a really short setting - he also proudly told me that heād āsorted out my problem weedsā by applying some lawn weed killer!
Aaarrrggghhh!
4 Likes
Iām all in favour of leaving roadside plants alone. Even more so where spraying of insecticide chemicals and weed killers is concerned. Obstructed view for traffic? TOUGH. Drive appropriately. As an aside Iām used (now) to tyre pressures being expressed In ābarsā or atmospheres such that 2,2 bars is 32 psi (I think!). Sod pascals and kilopascals and all that palava, I like bars or psi.
Boot poor you !
At least he meant well .
Thankfully I am not on speaking terms with my neighbour who shaves his lawn to about a one cm and eradicates any sort of plant that is over that height .
In fact I am only surprised he hasnāt replaced his grass with Astro turf !
1 Like
Thatās terrible Boot, but the roots will be conserving energy and moisture and the foliage and flowers will soon return in favourable conditions.
We lived next door to an artist who left his borders to grow wild, but did trim his lawn, and I must admit that it did take on a very pleasing lookā¦Naturaleā¦
2 Likes
Well, the grass will recover but the weed killer he used has probably killed off a lot of the plants.
Iām guessing some of the clover will survive and be able to spread again because itās quite resilient - but some of the other plants Iāve been encouraging have been very slow to spread and there is now a lot of very dead looking brown patches where they were. 
Fortunately, plants are pretty good at regeneration and spreading if they are not artificially stopped, so Iām optimistic I can encourage the lawn to re-wild again.
1 Like
Yep, the wind and the birds will be working hard to spread the love for you Bootā¦
Hereās a startā¦
1 Like
I agree - I have doubts as to whether simply letting the grass grow is re-wilding. It has become council policy not to mow as a cost cutting exercise, itās a simple as that. With all this dry weather letting grass grow waist high is a fire hazard, but our council say that is not their problem.
1 Like
You have to take the grass off in the first instance and them seed it with wild flowers . The grass comes back but the wild flowers will have become established by then.
Our council donāt know that, which is why I donāt believe they are re-wilding at all. Itās just an excuse not to maintain the area and cop out of their responsibilities. A chap I spoke to about it told me that they leave it so they can gather the seeds and scatter them. For heavenās sake the grass is totally dry and any seeds there were have disappeared. It is no good for fodder either - no nutrition in it. Our lot will tell us anything.
He was talking Baldocks 
Yes. I am going to have another go at him. This council official was a real jobsworth and said it was not their fault if fires got started. He tried to tell me that DEFRA had some sort of stewardship on the land which backs onto our gardens and goes right along with woodlands to a dam. I looked up what that might mean and apparently DEFRA pay the council for the stewardship. Soooo if the council have money from DEFRA why donāt they use it for maintaining the land it is intended for, I am not sure what he means by DEFRA stewardship other than DEFRA pay the council something. My concern at this time of year is that fires can easily start up (usually by folks having BBQs in the fields) and as the fire engines could not access the lands with their lorries then it would burn out of control in very little time. Our council is notoriously difficult to get any sensible answers from and they will make up any old thing to get out of doing anything.