To think fake grass is not tacky

[Dizzydodo]

At the Doctors with dd about eczema, GP says it can be triggered by pollen, grass seed etc and asks if she's been in the garden a lot with the nice weather. I say 'yes but we've got fake grass'. GP rolls his eyes, laughs and says 'fake grass?! Like Wayne Rooney? Goodness me!'

I have no idea if Wayne Rooney has fake grass or not and I'm not in the least bit offended by the GP (I think he was trying to be funny) but it got me thinking....does fake grass in my garden make me a wannabe WAG?

Those topiary balls are very odd, aren't they? Like a disco ball for the garden. I know they're very retro possibly tacky? but I do like a good old hanging basket.

They are odd. Surely people don't think they look real? Or doesn't it matter what looks real now?

Yes, still a fan of the hanging basket here. And I love a bowl of mixed pansies.

Holes you say it just screams fucking idiot

Well you obviously don't want a civil discussion so I would just flip my middle finger back at you. I'm far from a fucking idiot

In terms of environmental cost, it really depends where you live. As someone mentioned Vegas for example, it is far more environmentally friendly to have fake grass than the environmental impact of maintaining grass in a desert. If you live in Ireland and have a nice grass lawn fair enough but people in dry climates with lovely green grass lawns, petrol mowers, fertiliser and sprinklers are not being kinder to the environment than someone with plastic grass and a broom. Especially if that grass also comes from recycled products.

Oh the fake topiary balls! That are clearly made from plastic as they bounce around if a mouse farts in their direction. And then they get sun bleached.

Well I do agree with you there dizzy but Vegas is an extreme example. Surely the whole place is one giant disaster. Doesn't it use more water per capita than anywhere on earth? Or maybe it used to be, but that's probably been outdone by somewhere like Dubai now. Anyway, I know this is super selfish of me, but I honestly think that if you have to make the choice between having a sodden bog or dustbowl for a garden, or getting plastic grass then the right thing to do is stick with the bog/dustbowl. Easy for me to say, I know, but I just think our planet is more important than having a 'nice' lawn, which just is not a necessity and not important enough to warrant the manufacture, transport and disposal/recycling of yet more plastic.

Thanks MUm I HATE topiary by the way, I know it's all the rage now shame!

I don't mind real topiary, I think it looks pretty impressive in a really formal garden at a grand stately home or something like that. But those fake green balls are very funny. I used to regularly walk past a house with huge real topiary dinosaurs in the front garden. The house itself was a 60s bungalow and it was dwarfed by a huge green t-rex. Hilarious!

Real or false topiary! It's a waste of time and unkind to plants

Oh it's definitely a waste of time! If I can justify giving up ironing I couldn't possibly defend topiary

Yak hate fake grass sorry

I agree about 'nice' lawns, even when not plastic they are ridiculous and can be obsessed about to such an extent with chemical fertilisers, weed killers, continual mowing etc. etc. that probably plastic grass could be better.

I used to regularly walk past a house with huge real topiary dinosaurs in the front garden. The house itself was a 60s bungalow and it was dwarfed by a huge green t-rex. Hilarious!

I was at uni in Sheffield and one of the houses near me in Crookes was an end terrace and they did a sea monster out of their hedge! It was amazing!!

We are about to get it. Large-ish rear garden which is completely paved, on top of several tonnes of rubble and hardcore. Would require 3+ weeks work, plus a digger to get down to soil (oh, no access for a digger, so that and all materials would have to be craned over the house), and even then it would be on a poorly-drained slope with boggy areas (as informed by our neighbours who knew the garden when it was lawned previously). It would need to be in-filled with tonnes of topsoil, which would also mean getting rid of our summer house as the lawn would be considerably higher than it. So, massive upheaval for a lawn that probably wouldn't be much good.

We live in parkland, surrounded by huge trees with thick hedges to 3 sides and numerous bee-friendly plants, and I personally think artificial grass will be better for the immediate environment than the current paving slabs. And playing on rock hard Indian sandstone paving quickly loses its appeal to my kids!

I would dearly love real grass, but it's just not practical or possible for everyone.

I honestly think that if you have to make the choice between having a sodden bog or dustbowl for a garden, or getting plastic grass then the right thing to do is stick with the bog/dustbowl.

Why? What good does a small patch of mud and clay soil do other than leave an unusable and neglected space which never gets visited or used?
When my garden was a sodden bog, we didn't open the back door. There was nothing there apart from a bit of bindweed coming over next doors fence.
Now, we have a lovely apple tree which several bird feeders, climbing plants over the fences, beds along 3 sides and Mason Bee houses. We maintain all these things because our garden is somewhere nice to spend time in. We can only spend time there because it has artificial lawn and is now a usable space.

If it was still a bog, there isn't a hope I've be wading through it to tend to vegetable boxes or flower beds and then tramp mud back through the house.

I admire the dedication whois! It's obviously very skilled. I don't even know how to prune my olive tree

Yes MumOnACornishFarm vegas is an extreme example, but nice grass doesn't grow well on heathland and moors. Which covers great areas of the UK. It also isn't natural in humid areas, where tropical grass is natural but not as beautiful. The amount of temperate grass lawns I saw in Florida was scary. It would be better to have tropical grass or fake grass.

Of course if you have a bog or dust patch and you lay fake grass on it, it's still going to be a bog or dust patch underneath that. There is the transport to consider but a lot of fake grass is recycled and recycleable. Better covering someone's bog than clogging up the seas, no?

sparechange it sounds really nice. I hope you're having more fruit from your apple than I am from my trees! I'm a bit hopeless when it cones to my apples & pears.
You make a very compelling argument, amd I completely understand the desire for a pleasant garden that you want to spend time in. I can also see why that's encouraged you to make other investments that clearly benefit nature. But I do find it difficult to get past the plastic issue. Even using recycled materials the energy and water required to produce the fake lawn, and then transport it, and then whatever happens to it on disposal just seem to high a price to pay, in my book. I get what you're saying about your garden and in ways, yes, the fake grass would seem like a good solution. But it still wasn't strictly necessary.

Maybe dizzy but I worry that 'recycled and recyclable' is a bit of a smoke screen at times. I don't have the data, so of course you can rip me apart at this stage, but the energy it takes to recycle plastics is huge. And it's a bit of a myth that we can all recycle plastics at the end of their life. Often that doesn't happen, because there's not enough demand for the recycled material and there's so much supply. Ultimately I think we need to tackle the desire for such products, and our level of consumption of plastics (and everything else) in general. So creating a fashion for perfect lawns that then creates a market for plastic grass (even assuming all of it is produced using recycled plastics, which I don't think is the case) is damaging for the planet.

NIce or not nice grass is just an acceptable WEED really . Of course what grows naturally in certain areas like gorse, heather etc. is fine and can be put in gardens. It may not be comfortable to walk on though, I always wear proper gardening shoes, so if what people want is carpet in their gardens ; back to the unlovely plastic grass I suppose.

My fruit trees took 4 years to fruit Mum I planted a quince which has died sadly.

And of course, if the energy used to produce it is renewable them even better.

Everything has drawbacks. Our house is solar powered, we have great big plastic panels on the roof plus the conversion unit/cbox thing. They were produced using energy and water. Of course we sell back some energy now and chances are the energy used to produce them was hydro or wind but
they're still plastic, they won't last forever, they will also need to be recycled or disposed of. The logic is the same as fake grass iver manicured lawn.
Ideally we should not have any electricity and everyone should have totally natural outside space. The western world is not on that page anymore though.

No of course we can't live that way dizzy which is why the eco argument has to be progressive. But I would suggest that the benefit of your solar panels far outweighs the benefit of your fake lawn, and therefor the ecological cost to produce, transport & dispose/recycle is far more justified. But I am no more making an argument for manicured, watered lawn than I am for plastic grass. I think both are unnecessary. Maybe I am a full on lawn nazi, but I hope not.

I would love a quince ppeat! My apples & pears are only 2 yrs old, so I need to be patient. A few also got quite damaged in the winter storms in 2014 as we are pretty high up with nothing between us and the atlantic, although it is quite a distance from us.

But Cornish, you could say the same about carpets indoors.
We don't need them, all that nylon and underlay and complicated manufacturing. Even wool ones will be full of dyes and chemicals, and have all been transported huge distances. Not to mention disposing of them when tastes change or they get worn out. And god only knows how un-ecological laminate flooring us. My house is mostly wooden floors, but I would bet they are far from perfect as well.

It isn't strictly necessary to have anything other than a natural earth floor, or possibly resposibly-mined flagstones (no rugs, obv) but I bet you don't have them throughout your house.

There is a disproportionate amount of criticism and scrutiny about artificial lawns! Gravel dredging is the cause of huge damage to our seas, slate mining is now mostly done in China, so those lovely chips for your garden have an enormous carbon footprint (and I would guess the working conditions for the miners aren't too pleasant either).

There isn't a single person here who has a garden purely for the benefit of the wider world and not for the benefit of their family.
Even our decision to have an apple tree was based on me wanting to have a go at getting back to my Somerset roots by making Cider each summer!

Though the perfect lawn fashion has been round for well over 100 years Mum I though we were becoming more relaxed about them (if you listen to Gardeners' Question Time you might fondly think so) The fashion for wild flower lawns is on the rise happily, I saw a lovely one in Sissinghurst last week.