The view of Sonny Marsman (33) changed last spring. The smooth green meadow opposite his house got shades of yellow and white from one week to the next. Up close, Sonny saw that it was dandelions and other herbs that grew through the thick turf and now lit up the meadow in their bloom.
Sonny lives with his sheepdog in a detached house between the cattle farms in Daarlerveen. On the east side of his home is a young pig farmer and on the north, west and south are dairy farmers that surround Sonny’s lot.
When he bought the house about six years ago, Sonny’s garden, which spans three thousand square feet, was neatly arranged with rhododendrons, bulb hydrangeas, straight and cylindrical yew bushes, and a tight lawn.
Controlled naturalizing
At first Sonny kept things tidy like his neighbors: he mowed the grass every week, hoeed between the plants, trimmed the hedges, but two years ago, from the moment he started to delve more deeply into biodiversity, he naturalizing the garden in a controlled manner, which means that he only mows the lawn a few times a year, does not fertilize his garden, no longer uses mole traps and hoes and prunes as little as possible.
‘s naturalization project NRC so came when called, and instead of one square meter Sonny set up twenty square meters on his lawn with wooden picket posts. In the beginning, Sonny kept a close eye on the changes. He photographed the purple trot that spread rapidly over the wild stretch and he enjoyed the red and white clovers in the tall grass, but in the summer the long blades of grass turned from the heat and turned brown and yellow due to lack of water.
Not a pretty sight, Sonny thinks, but what does strike him is that at the moment there are a lot of rabbit droppings in the field, unlike the rest of his garden. He also regularly sees squirrels rooting under the folded culms. Young oak shoots betray their gathering places.
A rare plant
Sonny thinks the best thing about his naturalization project is the increase in species in his garden. He recently discovered Blue Bedstraw, a rare plant with small purple flowers that is threatened with extinction in the Netherlands. It just grew up in the tall grass.
The changes in Sonny’s garden do not go unnoticed by the neighbors. In the summer, a neighbor jokingly offered to drop by one afternoon with a can of poison to get his lawn smooth again. Another neighbor also suggested that Sonny’s berm full of stinging nettles should be mowed “once”. It’s well-intentioned, Sonny knows, but he kindly declined.
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