[APWG] ARTICLE: The surprising downside of #NoMowMay//Allelopathic Pollen

[Park, Margaret E]

Not cutting your lawn and letting dandelions grow for a month is touted as an easy way to help bees. But one-size-fits-all solutions don't work for conservation.

Sheila Colla, May 13, 2022, Rewilding

Dandelions elicit extreme reactions. They’re considered the bane of lawn care, hated with a fervour used to justify the massive chemical onslaught (fed by the lawn-care industry and advertising) that has been enlisted for decades to solve the “scourge” of this yellow flower. Anyone allowing a few dandelions to tarnish the greensward of lawn risks community shaming.

There’s a movement afoot to redeem the dandelion. Like the plant itself, the movement started in Britain and has been imported to North America. Under the banner of a catchy slogan, #NoMowMay<https://twitter.com/hashtag/nomowmay?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Ehashtag> urges people to let the lawn grow with freedom for one spring month, and to celebrate the spontaneous vegetation that appears, in order to “feed the bees.”

This initiative may have value in the U.K., where it originated and where local bees have co-evolved with those plants. But North American lawns, maintained with pesticides and fertilizers, don’t support native plant and native bee populations. There’s huge value in challenging monocultural lawns and the enormous ecological damage they have caused, but offering a feel-good moment of aesthetic rebellion risks obscuring, and even undermining, the bigger goal.

Instead of encouraging #LazyLawns<https://twitter.com/search?q=%23lazylawns&src=typed_query&f=top> what we need to do, urgently, is to steward, tend and nurture landscapes for native biodiversity and ecological integrity. A month of long lawns filled with dandelions and other non-native weedy species just doesn’t cut it. It’s the ecological equivalent of opening a fast-food restaurant on every corner – for a short amount of time. At best, burgers and fries for a while, but not a sustained full-service menu of healthy nutrition and habitat for pollinators.

While we need to loosen the grip of the lawn on our collective landscape imaginings, here’s what the little research done to date on dandelions tells us. Dandelion has allelopathic pollen, a scientific term that basically means the pollen of dandelions can reduce reproductive success in native wildflowers, disrupting the native plant communities it invades. Another study showed that queen bumblebees (some of the early emerging wild bees that pro-dandelion campaigns say dandelions help) resorted to eating their own eggs when fed a diet of protein-deficient dandelion pollen.

Read full article: https://www.rewildingmag.com/no-mow-may-downside/?fbclid=IwAR2gLmBmJj5gO6KDBCytqL2zC-fKXSS4b9NjmPsTkVS9Ekhi6aWeuEDsU8E
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