Maybe it's the snob factor, but I can't bring myself to AstroTurf my garden

Telegraph

4 days ago

When I bought my house a few summers ago, one of the only nice things about it was in the back garden. It boasts an enormous magnolia tree with beautiful pink blossoms in spring, and a thick canopy of leaves in summer.
We completely redid the house from top to bottom, including the garden, which was reduced to rubble and mud after a side and rear kitchen extension. We laid a new grass lawn (against the advice of our gardener), which looked lush and healthy until the autumn. That was when the trouble started.
The magnolia shed hundreds of leaves daily over our small lawn, creating a thick carpet of them which, if we didn't religiously rake and scoop up each night, would lead to a horrible slimy layer underneath. I confess, we didn't keep up with the raking, and our lovely lawn perished.
Come spring, the grass looked so dreadful we simply had to replace it, and we faced the classic modern middle-class dilemma: install real grass or throw in the towel and go for AstroTurf.
We were shown photographs of upmarket artificial grass in high-end gardens that looked pretty realistic, and of course, the practical benefits were hugely attractive. It would need no watering, no cutting, and crucially, it would still look perfectly lush even after an autumn of heavy leaf fall.
And yet, we still couldn't bring ourselves to do it. A huge factor was the price. Suppliers of 'premium' fake lawns in London clearly know it's big business, and they charge through the nose for it.
I suspect the fake grass industry has turned into a bit of a racket, as we could barely believe the price of the quote, which was thousands of pounds. We could have laid fresh turf every year for at least five years for the same price as laying artificial lawn once.
There's also undeniably a snob factor around fake grass, since some view it as aesthetically and environmentally inferior to real grass. I have never been a huge fan of the modern 'Love Island' pristine garden aesthetic, with lots of white wash, clean lines and immaculate bright green lawns.
For my own space, I had in mind an imperfect English country garden with a real lawn, beds of pretty hydrangeas and clematis, and jasmine climbing the fence.
I wouldn't care if someone judged my lawn for being fake if I thought it was the right choice for my garden, but I do worry whether the stigma could affect our house price if we were to sell eventually. Perhaps that's another reason why I resisted.
Overall finish matters hugely when calculating house prices in our area, and I worry that while splashing out on hugely expensive fake grass wouldn't add any value, installing poorly-fitted AstroTurf might actually reduce the asking price. This is especially pertinent since the entire lawn is extremely visible through large Crittall-style doors at the back of the house.
Whether to fake it or not is a hot debate among friends in my local area. Busy middle-class parents love to moan about the poor health of their grass lawns, which when they're trying to hold down demanding jobs, raise children, exercise, eat healthily and have a social life, really are some way down the list of priorities and a complete and utter pain in the backside to maintain.
I'd probably find it easier to give in and go artificial if I hadn't grown up in the countryside with views of grass fields, trees and hedgerows as far as the eye could see. Now, living in a place dominated by concrete and bricks, giving up on having a real lawn feels painful.
We've vowed to be better at picking up leaves this autumn, and to reseed the lawn in the spring, and for now we will carry on watering it during dry spells. We've learnt the hard way that keeping a real lawn is a labour of love, but whether our efforts will be enough to save our latest batch of turf remains to be seen.
If not, then we might just have to get over ourselves, and the cost, and install some plastic grass.