To the untrained eye, Jarno Coone has failed to maintain his lawn.
“My philosophy is to kind of not work when it comes to the lawns,” said Jarno, whose job includes maintaining the lawns and gardens at the Candlebark and Alice Miller schools.
However, Jarno has put in many hours to have his yard appear as it stands today: unkempt, wild and full of weeds.
It has annoyed the meter reader and a neighbour who dobbed him in to council, that forced him to cut the grass. But others see it and believe it’s a delight.
A Canberra couple, in Kyneton last week to visit family, took an evening stroll by his house to view his front yard.
On arrival, the Canberran woman exclaimed, “I tell you what, people would pay a fortune to get a garden just like yours, it’s like a prairie garden”.
The couple passed by because last week they’d read about his lawn in The Guardian. Jarno was featured because he had been crowned this year’s winner of The World’s Ugliest Lawn competition – a global phenomenon that originated in Sweden to promote water conservation. The philosophy is to not water lawns for aesthetic purposes.
And Jarno has never watered his lawn.
“We came here 13 years ago. This was supposedly a lawn, and I knew I’d never water it. I don’t believe in that,” he said.
“I’m pretty frugal generally, with any sort of resources, so I don’t want to use water or herbicide.
“I haven’t used the green bin in 13 years. Anything that grows here gets cut – if it needs to be cut – and laid back down to build up soil, to keep moisture in, to keep the microbes living as much as possible.”
Doing so has allowed the native insects to thrive, subsequently drawing more native wildlife, birds and microbats to his yard.
“I realised that I like nature more than I like gardening,” Jarno said.
But it required an effort to establish the natural habitat around his home.
Jarno, a self-described agapanthus-hater, removed all the invasive weeds with seeds, so they couldn’t spread, and replaced them with sentimental items.
He has a cactus planted in the ground that originally sat on his nan’s kitchen window sill, until the day she died. Then there’s the brown, plastic letterbox with one side of its roof painted with clashing red.
“The neighbour was throwing this letterbox out and we needed one. It doesn’t have a number on it, so it worked. Then my daughter decided to decorate it with paint, but gave up halfway.”
Just as Jarno did with his lawn.
