What is so great about grass?

Steve Jones writes for Sid Valley Biodiversity Group (Image: Contributed)

I like chips. Crisp on the outside, soft in the middle and hot.

But chips are not the only food. If I eat chips, chips and only chips my life would be nasty, sickly and short. And what tasty delights I would miss.

I like lawns. Bowling greens, flat and smooth, or that green carpet surrounding a Georgian mansion. But lawns are not the only grass.

If every grass in the land was lawn, lawn and nothing but lawn what a lifeless country it would be. There would be fewer flowers, fewer insects and fewer birds

I would miss the delight of semi cut grass, short enough for a picnic but bejewelled with daisies buttercups clover and dandelions.

Where children can make daisy chains and tell the time blowing seed heads, alive with the buzzing of bees.

I would miss the delight of flowery meadows.

Rich all summer long with a vast range of stunning flowers alive with clouds of butterflies.

My favourite meadow flower is yellow rattle, that every year comes up in a different place and keeps the grass in check.

I would miss the wild grassland that is never cut, where grasshoppers sing and voles and field mice make grassy tunnels. Once a field mouse crawled into my hand and fell asleep.

So many wonderful flowers bloom here like meadow sweet and toadflax.

My favourite is the sweetly perfumed native valerian often used in Chelsea show gardens.

In gardens and parks nature used to be something to be conquered or eradicated. On black and white TV Percy Thrower showed us how to garden with noxious chemicals and every garden shed was a mini Porton Down.

Energy came in sacks carried by the coalman and we filled the air with smoke and the atmosphere with carbon.

Extinction was a word used about dinosaurs and dodos. Now I know extinction is knocking at the door, it begins with the flowers but soon gets down to the humans.

It is nature that can heal the climate crisis and the extinction emergency...

Young Greta of the Scandi Vert says “Action brings hope”.

If you need a little more hope join with the Friends of the Byes on a Saturday morning to help restore nature.