When Even the Golf Courses Turn Brown

This summer, I've found comfort in brown lawns.

That isn't a sentence I ever expected to write.

As I've been driving around over the past few weeks, I've found myself looking beyond my own garden. The local golf courses have lost their lush green colour. Bowling greens aren't looking quite as immaculate as they usually do. Parks, verges and front lawns across the neighbourhood are all telling the same story.

I have to admit, I found it oddly comforting.

For anyone who spends time caring for a garden, it's easy to feel as though we've somehow got it wrong when a lawn turns brown. We water when we can, we feed, we mow carefully, and yet the grass still fades from green to straw. It's tempting to wonder whether we've failed.

But this summer has been a gentle reminder that even the most carefully managed lawns can't always outgrow the weather.

The truth is, a brown lawn isn't necessarily an unhealthy one.

During prolonged hot, dry weather, grass has an extraordinary way of protecting itself. Instead of continuing to grow and using precious moisture, it simply slows down and becomes dormant. It may look dry and lifeless above ground, but beneath the surface the roots are quietly waiting for cooler temperatures and rain.

In other words, your lawn is resting rather than dying.

That doesn't mean we should ignore it completely. Newly laid turf and freshly sown lawns will usually need watering during extended dry spells because their roots haven't had time to establish. But older, well-established lawns are often far more resilient than we give them credit for.

In fact, watering little and often can sometimes do more harm than good. A deep, occasional soak encourages roots to grow down into the soil in search of moisture, making the grass better equipped to cope with future dry spells. The way your soil holds onto that moisture also makes a real difference—something I explored in my post Learning to Love Clay Soil.

Perhaps that's one of the lessons this summer has quietly been teaching us.

For years we've become used to seeing photographs of perfect emerald-green lawns. They've become the picture of what a successful garden should look like. Yet nature doesn't always work to our expectations. Some summers are simply hotter and drier than others, and our gardens respond accordingly. I found myself reflecting on this very idea in my recent post, What I'm Noticing in the Garden – July: The Quiet Resilience of Summer, where I wrote about how this long spell of dry weather is changing not just our gardens, but perhaps our expectations of them too.

As our climate continues to change, we may need to rethink what a healthy lawn looks like.

A patch of golden grass in July isn't necessarily a sign of neglect. It may simply be a lawn doing exactly what it has evolved to do.

Ironically, one of the things that finally put my mind at ease wasn't looking at my own garden at all. It was seeing the nearby golf courses and bowling greens.

If teams of professional groundskeepers, with all their expertise and specialist equipment, are watching their lawns fade during an exceptional summer, perhaps the rest of us can be a little kinder to ourselves too.

The rain will come. The temperatures will ease. Tiny green shoots will begin to appear again, almost as if nothing had happened.

Gardens have a remarkable capacity to recover when we allow them to work with the seasons rather than against them.

Maybe the perfect lawn isn't the one that stays green all summer long.

Maybe it's the one that's healthy enough to rest, resilient enough to recover, and patient enough to wait for the rain.

Nature. Nurtured.