A bee curls around a clover flower.

Three years ago, I wrote about my plan to keep a yard of wildflowers by mowing just once a year, in early spring. But, after a glorious first year, the yard came to fill with much tall grass and few wildflowers. This year, I have a new plan. While mowing, when I come across a nice patch of wildflowers, I mow around it. If at the next mowing the patch still shows bloom or promise, I keep it. During the last mowing, as I came up on a patch of clover and ground ivy, I weighed whether it had bloom enough worth saving. Then I saw a bee working the flowers there, and chose to mow around that patch. In this way, I hope to keep a mowed lawn with wildflower islands, enjoyed by both human and bee.

wrote ‘Almost Cut My Grass’ – The Paragraph 2011-07-11

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By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright (CC BY-ND) 2014