24/04/2026
Food for thought☺️ At Cae Hir we don't light the garden at night, don't cut the lawns anywhere near as short as 1.5 inches and we definitely don't use a robotic lawn mower unless you count the Grumpy Gardener going into a daze doing it every 5 days! So I honestly never thought about any of these things - but this made me think about our towns and cities and struggling wildlife. So as I said, food for thought 🌸🌿🌼🌳🦔🌝🦎
The most alive garden is the one you cannot see. Everything that protects it works while the gardener sleeps.
Thirty years ago, the suburban garden came alive at night. Today it is increasingly empty — and there are three reasons.
Permanent outdoor lighting disorients moths until exhaustion. Fireflies — the eastern US has several species across the genus Photinus and Photuris — cannot emit their signals effectively in a light-polluted environment. The female signals from low vegetation to attract males flying overhead. In any yard with ambient light contamination, males cannot find females. Firefly populations have declined across suburban and peri-urban America over the past three decades.
The robotic lawnmower programmed to run at night operates at exactly the time nocturnal wildlife is active. The blades can injure toads, box turtles, and nesting mammals. In much of the US these are the animals quietly controlling slugs, caterpillars, and grubs for free. Night-running robot mowers are an emerging threat to ground-dwelling wildlife.
Grass cut to 1.5 inches every week is a desert for moth larvae — the food base for bats and insectivorous birds at dawn. Many common moth species need grass of sufficient length to overwinter. Remove that, and you remove a link in the entire nocturnal food chain.
Four things that restore the night:
Switch off all non-essential outdoor lighting after 10pm. If security lighting is needed, use motion-activated rather than permanent fixtures, and direct beams downward, not into vegetation. Use warm-color bulbs (under 3000K) rather than cool white, which disrupts insects more severely.
Program the robotic mower to run only during daylight hours. This single change immediately reduces wildlife casualty risk.
Leave a strip of uncut grass at least three feet wide along a hedge, wall, or fence line. Cut it once a year in October. This strip provides habitat for moth larvae, ground beetles, and the small mammals the night garden needs.
Plant white-flowered, night-scented native species: common evening primrose (Oenothera biennis), moonflower vine (Ipomoea alba), native honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens — avoid the invasive Japanese Lonicera japonica), and four o'clocks. Moths return in the first season. Fireflies take two to three years if darkness is genuinely restored.
The garden belongs to something else at night. It only works if you give it the dark. 🌙
