Does artificial grass show an emotional disconnect with our gardens?

Chelsea Flower Show banned its use of artificial grass from 2022. We ask garden and wildlife pros what they think about plastic lawns 

A natural lawn acts as an Earth-friendly sink that absorbs CO2 and releases oxygen. File picture

Green perfection isn’t everything it seems.

Any trumpeted advantages of fake lawns have to be weighed against their negative environmental impacts. Bloom, our primary garden festival in Ireland, had heavily redacted the use of artificial grass by exhibitors.

Chelsea Flower Show banned its use outright from 2022. Thirty-five square metres of artificial grass equates to around 25kg of plastic. 

Plastic manufacture is a major environmental pollutant, never mind what happens next. As the emerald sheen of green synthetic “flooring” is increasingly deployed around our suburbs, let’s up the knowledge quotient before smothering Mother Earth.

Celebrated landscape designer and Irish Examiner garden columnist Peter Dowdall is a gentle, reflective soul, ready to tumble into laughter and smiles. Still, he hit the ground running when I brought this subject up.

Peter Dowdall at the Chelsea Flower Show which has banned the use of artificial grass.

“We really need to re-calibrate what we consider to be beautiful in our gardens,” says Peter. “Native wildflowers are beautiful. Living, nurturing, and growing things are beautiful. Pollinators like butterflies and bees are beautiful. Plastic carpets pretending to be grass is really awful stuff when it comes to the environment.”

Author, photographer, guide and podcaster on Irish native birds Eric Dempsey has this to add: “Neat and tidy is not the natural order of the environment. Our garden in Wicklow is a wild meadow. 

"We have insects, bees, butterflies, moths, field mice and birds galore all enjoying in and among this the grasses and flowers — a biodiversity heaven. 

"A house close by has a plastic lawn. I ask myself — what are these people thinking? It’s immaculate and tidy, but it is totally sterile. 

"Birds can’t feed on it to look for worms or insects. It is lifeless with no flowers, buzzing bees, butterflies or any other living creature. 

"In an era of diminishing biodiversity, I want to scream out loud! I would support a ban on plastic lawns for the sake of our critically endangered species.”

There are situations where in limited applications, its installation is understandable — roof gardens, balconies and community areas for gardeners who use wheelchairs, for instance. 

There are situations where in limited installations, synthetic grass is often used. We can offset some of its environmental impact with meadowland, container planting and larger borders elsewhere. File picture

Fake grass in typical C8-polymer, is a petrochemical, non-biodegradable product that’s mixed, coloured, moulded and assembled in a factory. In terms of characteristics, visually synthetic grass can be highly convincing from a distance. There’s nothing natural about it on closer inspection even with a soft touch and curated Irish tones. It’s a composite man-made pretender. Mixed synthetic, lawn matting is not easily separated into its constituent components. It must be taken for dumping as non-recyclable waste or incinerated.

If you skid on your face across a cheaper fake sward, it won’t read as grass. The worst examples are hard and static, and can cause friction abrasions with their unforgiving surface. Look out for shock-absorbing underlays and softer blends for play areas.

You don’t need to mow or water your fake grass, but you do need to clean it as nothing can biodegrade on its surface. 

No worm can raise its rubbery head, no bird can graze on invertebrates, and no slug, snail or caterpillar can survive here. The soil below is for all environmental purposes — dead. 

The natural cycles that protect its structure suspended.

Pond specialist Frances Gallagher of Rinn Bearna Aquatics in Whitegate, Cork, adds, “We are inclined to forget how much we depend on the ecosystem services of plants for every breath and every mouthful we consume. 

Frances Gallagher, Rinn Bearna Aquatics.

"When we replace these little green wonders with plastic, we waste a chance to see, smell and experience a fragment of nature.”

While you might not be working up a sweat mowing, shiny fake grass can get hot — very hot. That’s a consideration if you’re landscaping the garden for pets or placing it in a dog run. 

What does fresh plastic do when it warms up under a blazing sun? That’s right, it starts to off-gas, releasing chemical ingredients into the air. 

Your children won’t be weaving their fingers into the cool depths of natural grass or eyeballing a ladybird traversing a daisy on plastic grass (unless it’s sprinting for cover). Consider adding extra borders and container planting to offset this manmade desert.

For a variety of environmental and health reasons, there’s a growing controversy surrounding the use of AstroTurf for sports pitches, and the Netherlands have outlawed its use. Synthetic turf sheds tens of tonnes of microplastics used at scale, and crumb rubber made from recycled tyres can contain heavy metals, benzene, PFAS and phthalates.

I would qualify this by saying, this is the worst extreme of the fake turf sector. A reputable seller will respond to any concerns you have regarding the constituents, performance and longevity of their synthetic lawn.

Leaving real grass a little longer can alleviate the need for extensive watering, and every lawn can be effectively rewilded to become more self-sustaining, fertile and ecologically diverse.

A natural lawn acts as an Earth-friendly sink that absorbs CO2 and releases oxygen, and we don’t have to rely on negative, toxic practices to enjoy a living grass lawn. 

It’s up to you to reduce your use of regular chemical treatment, pesticides and fertilisers, and to embrace Peter’s ideas surrounding what’s truly lovely to the eye. Where you do have a natural lawn, it’s a potentially valuable little bit of grassland habitat for mammals and pollinators, birds, bees, butterflies, hedgehogs, and invertebrates. 

Real grass sward will pull leaf litter and grass clippings into the earth to fully biodegrade and fertilise your garden.

Peter Dowdall’s final word on the matter? “Sustaining life is one of the joys of gardening. The best lawns are robot-cut lawns. If you want to keep that lawn but you’re fed up to the back teeth of mowing, don’t get fake grass, invest in a little cyborg!”