I mentioned in my previous article the issue of cutting grass on graves. Having since moved to a new village, the grass in the churchyard is making the local news. It is immaculate, more akin to a bowling green. Volunteers cut it so suggesting they reduce mowing is akin to a personal insult. The state of the churchyard grass to many people is a reflection of community care.
Where does this bowling green mentality come from? It is certainly not from our distant past. Even when I began work in 1961, churchyards and cemeteries were still manually scythed. Those old men, drinking cold tea from stoppered beer bottles, did no more than three cuts each year. The grass grew long, the wildflowers bloomed and insects and butterflies flourished. It was at that time that petrol rotary mowers were introduced. They could cut rough grass which the earlier cylinder mowers could not. Only then could we maintain a bowling green finish. The neatly mown churchyard or cemetery has a history extending back no further than 70 years!
A mower seems a benign machine, a cause celeb in reducing all that laborious scything. But no, what it did was allow us to cut far more grass that hitherto. Worse, unlike the crotchety scythers, wildlife cannot escape the machines. Their vacuum power is massive so all insects meet oblivion. That has a knock-on effect for whatever preys on them. Meanwhile, with all the grass and herbs sent off for composting, voles have nothing to eat and so starve. They were the staple food for the owls that lived in the churchyard or cemetery. I actually witnessed the loss of owls at Shrewsbury Cemetery. They disappeared and nobody noticed until it was too late.
The scythers, little did we realise at the time, were environmental champions. In addition, the grass they cut could be stacked and sold as high quality fodder for feeding animals.
At the current time, mowing grass in Britain costs millions of pounds. Every council suffers a barrage of complaints when grass cutting rota’s fall behind. I worked closely with parks in councils around the UK. In May each year, we met to discuss the upcoming peak grass growth period in June. Will we cope? We were all conscious of the sheer absurdity of cutting grass. See it from the plant’s perspective. It just wants to flower, to put up its grass stem and bloom, giving many of us hay fever. However, before it can do that we cut it. The plant becomes piqued and so resolves to grow even more, a tit for tat battle in which the environment and economy suffers. Senior managers even posited letting grass grow until it had flowered, then starting the cutting regime. Nobody would authorise it and neither would councillors support it.
Perhaps the real question is less about the grass and more about the churchyard. What is its role and who is if for? The poets were more certain, the moping owl and the wildflowers growing over graves were to the fore. That was because Wordsworth and Greys Elegy only related to a churchyard that was scythed. Could they even have envisaged a mown churchyard? I doubt it.
In reality, a churchyard is for the burial of parishioners. However, do not other forms of life have rights? Should our burial be attended by customs that deny all other forms of life? Surely, it is a fitting memorial to have owls living over the graves, as they have for perhaps a thousand years.
I managed 7 closed churchyards during my stint at Bereavement Services in Carlisle. Being closed and relatively remote, few people took interest in them. That gave me the opportunity to introduce conservation practice. I would inspect each site after Christmas and Easter. That enabled me to see which graves had a wreath or flowers, a sure sign of visiting relatives. In Spring I could also identify the best wildflower zones. I could also see where bulbs such as snowdrops were trying to establish. In addition, where unsafe memorials exist, often in large numbers, greater vegetation tends to keep people away. I then drew up a plan whereby unvisited areas could be cut less frequently. The savings made this way gave me funds to buy native daffodils and snowdrops (possibly native) and add these to the conservation zones. Each of these conservation areas put on a glorious spring show each year. The bulbs were part of selling the idea because they looked so attractive and reduced the potential for complaints.
That said, I still found myself under attack through local parish councils. One demanded that I stood before them to answer complaints. The chief complainant, a local man, stated that because I had ‘wilded’ the areas with no visitors, that I had discriminated against the paupers. He was right of course and I ceded to him. They could not afford memorials and their extensive graves were the best for wildflowers. All I could do was remind councillors that they had received lots of compliments about the floral display. They were also aware that owl numbers were rising and that crickets now flourished on the graves. They could be heard chirruping on bright summer days, no longer sucked up into mowers. The crickets could complete their life cycle on pauper’s graves, less so on the graves covered by the dead granite slabs of the more affluent.
I was also able to remind councillors that “The Living Churchyard” project operated by the Church of England supported what we were trying to do. Sadly, that scheme has had funding problems but more recent initiatives such as EcoChurch have similar objectives. My view is that a churchyard, as well as a cemetery, is a place of life. It is where our dead can create a special place, where owls feel safe and crickets call in the sunshine.
Article by Ken West