Gardeners at Oxford colleges row with lawn expert over ‘sustainable’ grass
A green-fingered row has erupted among those who tend lawns at the University of Oxford and a sustainable lawn expert.
Head gardeners at Christ Church and Worcester colleges are locked in a war of words with a horticultural expert over the seed mix on their grass and whether it is sustainable.
It began with a training session that David Hedges-Gower ran on April 4 about how Oxford colleges can start gardening without water, a direction that the university is understood to favour.
He was invited by Somerville College, whose gardeners invited their counterparts from other colleges to come along.
According to Mr Hedges-Gower, a consultant and chairman of the Lawn Association, 28 colleges enjoyed the session and provided positive feedback – but there were two outliers.
“Christ Church college was a group of gentlemen who certainly didn’t like change and they made that very clear at the beginning... they spent the entire day criticising everything,” one source with knowledge of the row said.
Now John James, the head gardener of Christ Church, and Simon Bagnall, the head gardener of Worcester College, have claimed that they felt underwhelmed by the training day.
“Recently we and many other gardeners from several Oxford colleges attended what was advertised as a sustainable lawn care training day, run by David Hedges-Gower, which seemed to be more of a prolonged sales pitch,” they wrote in a letter to The Telegraph.
“Although we cannot speak for all our colleagues, we know that many of us do not subscribe to his advice,” they added.
They said that “it may be true that there is an overuse of perennial ryegrass in some areas”, but insisted that any potential criticism they had been “led down the garden path” in the methods they use was not true, as they were already adapting to more sustainable practices without Mr Hedges-Gower’s help.
“At both our colleges we use a seed mix that contains a high proportion of fescue and bent grasses in the main quads, and have done so for many years, as we know it gives us a better sward for the lawn, but it still dies off in hot dry weather,” they said.
“The Oxford college garden community is a vast source of knowledge and experience, and many of us are moving to more sustainable lawn care using fewer chemicals, battery-powered machinery, reduced mowing and less water, while still producing the high-quality lawns for which we are justly renowned.”
Modern seed mixes used to re-turf many lawns at Oxford now require regular reseeding, watering and pesticide use to keep a ryegrass lawn thick.
Experts are keen for gardeners at Oxford and beyond to move to alternatives that go brown and re-grow on their own during summer rather than die.
‘Never pushed any sales’
Mr Hedges-Gower said he gifted the gardeners True Grass and True Plant, an eco-friendly organic fertiliser, and he plans in a future session to show them how to turn a ryegrass lawn – which dies and needs reseeding – into a more sustainable fescue and bent lawn that regrows after heatwaves.
Mr Hedges-Gower has defended his training, saying he “never pushed any sales onto them”.
“Part of the reason we were called in was because in most colleges, the use of water was to be stopped,” he told The Telegraph.
He said the training discussed organic fertilisers and “how to keep the university’s lawns sustainable and without water and chemical use, which was achieved”.
“There [are] a few colleges who do use ryegrass in their sports pitches and lawns who were buffering from the advice in the first place and had no plans to change what they were doing, which is fine and up to them,” he added.
Mr Hedges-Gower said he hoped there would be more training days on sustainable thinking with Oxford gardeners and that many attendees provided “high levels of thanks” for what they learnt.
Among those to praise him was Alastair Mallick, head gardener of Oxford’s Somerville College, who said that it had been “eye-opening” to discover “all the misleading information that we have been told over the years”.
