Raising expectations
With the benefit of hindsight Frank can see clearly how his raised lawn can become a thing of perfection, but will that make the rest of the garden impoverished by comparison?
Will perfection in a raised lawn make the rest of Frank Ronan’s garden seem impoverished in comparison?
IT IS BETTER TO TRUST YOUR FUTURE SELF TO KNOW BETTER THAN TO TRUST YOUR PRESENT SELF TO BE INFALLIBLE
Not long after this garden began a builder friend who was gutting a large house in Kennington said that I could have all the joists, if I could take them away. Luckily, my new next door neighbour and subsequent old friend was then in possession of a flat-bed lorry and, two trips to London later, we were in possession of an enviable stash of lumber. It has been used for building sheds and making potting benches and raising and edging beds and to contain the raised lawn.
It wasn’t my intention to have a lawn at all, but I soon realised that unsupervised guests would, with no shorn grass to park their ends on, flop their unseeing posteriors on the meadow and make orchid carnage. There were four square vegetable beds in the original plan. In reality the last one would become the pond; the second has become a stock bed and the third is about to be an asparagus bed. The nearest was the first to deviate from the blueprint, doubling in height to become the raised lawn.
It has been a success. Though only ten foot by ten, it can accommodate a phenomenal number of loungers, with those on the periphery able to dangle their sandalled legs over the edge. A judicious drinks tray placed in the centre will keep the well-meaning out of your hair for a good hour’s kitchen time. For a couple of years some persistent hornets made a home in the rubble at the core of the structure, from which they made painful objections to my mowing of it, but were eventually dissuaded with petrol and a match. The mowing itself, while no bother to me, was a bit tricky because of lifting the mower up, and of balancing the wheels on the very edge to do the perimeter.
So, during the exile, it became a little thistley and tummocky without regular attention. It was evident that it needed scalping and returfing. The wooden walls were also becoming slightly rocking with age. In the sheds and in the benches, those joists will see me out, silvering quicker than I do, but untreated and in contact with soil they were never going to last long. Fifteen years isn’t bad. If I hadn’t taken them they would have been burnt. They were probably cut from virgin forest in Oregon a hundred and fifty years ago; better for them to rot gently into my earth untreated than to add to the carbon dioxide in the air and the god-knowswhat chemicals in my soil.
The experiment has been made for very little trouble and no expense. I recommend, if you have a brilliant and novel idea for your garden, to make a cheap and impermanent version to begin with. Had I made that raised lawn of stone and brick and money at the start, I would be haunted forever by improvements that now seem obvious. It would be insupportably annoying. It is better to trust your future self to know better than to trust your present self to be infallible.
So now, this, my future self, thinks that the walls of the raised lawn will be made of brick. The rubble below will have sand rammed into it so that no hornet would consider making itself comfortable there. The turf will no longer go all the way to the edge, but to a paved border that a mower will run along in an unthinking hurry. There will be a ramp running up one side the width of a mower so the job can be done without first switching the thing off, let alone lifting it or worrying about lifting the wrong way and leaking petrol into the filter.
The only problem with this revision is that in its perfection it will make all the surroundings seem rustic and improvised by comparison. I shouldn’t fret. Experience tells me that nothing in this garden remains impeccable for more than a disconcerting moment. Our gardens are disturbingly revealing of ourselves.