When the mowing gets tough, it’s time to battle for our lawns

CERTAIN things struggle to grow here in the Outer Hebrides, given our damp and boisterous weather and thin, acidic soil. My Californian lilac refuses stubbornly to flower. My quince tree – perhaps the most north-westerly in Europe – refuses to fruit.

Wheat cannot be grown at all – the wind knocks the grain off before there is any prospect of harvest. But one thing that grows exuberantly, relentlessly and continuously is grass.

There is something terribly British about lawns – queues, flat ale, tea at the vicarage and cries of ‘Howzat?’ from the village green. Be your garden ever so small, most of us want a patch of manicured green, even if it requires annual feeding and a weekly haircut.

And some powerful childhood memories involve them – the excitement of sitting on warm spring grass, padding about barefoot, setting up paddling pools and badminton nets, drifting off to sleep of a June school night as, outside, your dad had at the greenacre with his sturdy Suffolk Punch.

But in our Hebridean climate the reality is a little different. After a threemonth absence, during which my lawn had been rejoicing in the soft Highland rain and the very long days (and ‘white nights’) of so northern a latitude, I returned to find it waist-high, a jungle that could have hosted the Viet Cong and which, when the wind dropped, sent forth midges in one grey cloud of floating, squeaky torment.

Surveying this nightmare pasture that swayed and shimmied in the breeze, I thought bleakly of a gooey American song – Iowa, That’s Where The Tall Corn Grows. For days, I held back – there was so much else to do – but, finally, I began my battleplan with a strimmer.

A strimmer is the only thing you can launch at grass higher than your lawn mower. It will lacerate anything within the range of its two lengths of vicious plastic wire. Mine is German and comes with minimal instructions, which is a nuisance as I use it so infrequently I keep forgetting the rules.

This requires swift resort to YouTube, which abounds in short videos of bedenimed American rednecks with names like Hubba, Nahum or Eupyl, telling you everything you need to know about the operation of, in this instance, the Stihl FS 40.

THERE are three central complications. Strimmers will not run, or so much as cough, on simple straightforward petrol. They demand two-stroke mix – 25 parts of unleaded to one of an exotic and costly oil – and this has to be measured with heroindealing accuracy.

Next there is the cutting head. This plastic drum has frequently to be opened – a sort of nightmarish Chinese puzzle with springs apt to bounce out and other bits to fall off and roll away. Two yards of cutting wire have to be coiled inside it, and in opposite directions, and somehow held in place while you put the head back together.

Finally there is a strimmer’s propensity to blind, deafen and maim. I need safety goggles, lest it fling gravel into my eyes, and hearing defenders as the screaming motor in operation is barely a foot from my right lug. One is best advised also to wear thick gloves, as the strimmer vibrates maniacally and can leave hands numb and tin- gling after protracted use. So I start to start the strimmer and, half an hour later, finally assault an area of grass that now seems the size of Minneapolis. I move into it amidst a flurry of toppling stems and atomised greenery, sweeping the beast from side to side as if searching for land mines, goggles misty and hearing clogged in one herbivorous experiment in sensory deprivation.

I am become Death, destroyer of worlds. Within the hour, I am streaming with hay fever but battering bravely on. By afternoon’s end, I have something resembling the aftermath of Culloden, albeit with fewer body parts strewn around.

The loveliest thing about strimming is when it stops. I can take off all the clobber and, with palsied hands, return everything to the shed and take a dose of antihistamine. There is still no lawn, merely a battered, shaggy meadow, but I cannot yet unleash the lawnmower proper. I must first wash all the green mulch out of my ears and then deploy the hover mower.

The Flymo has none of the strimmer’s steely, murderous feel of Hitler’s war machine. It’s less hardware than Tupperware: a big plasticky affair with a sort of soft skirt and, by definition, no wheels. It must be carried painfully out, set on that battered grass and folded open for use. Miles of cable trail behind and the extension lead is always tangled.

The Flymo does not roar and devour. Moaning, it floats before me like a sinister hovercraft. If I stop squeezing the handles for a nanosecond, it cuts out. The basket inside is a diddy wee thing and I must stop incessantly.

Given that it goes about, seeking whom it may devour, on a cushion of air, it doesn’t cut particularly close, though will certainly sever that pest of a cable if the attention wanders from the sheer boredom.

FINALLY I am done and, once more, the engine and accoutrements of war can be stowed away. I gaze, now, on grass resembling a somewhat unkempt football pitch and pour a restorative drink.

Act three calls for the lawnmower. There are basically three types. A cylinder mower has a rear roller and, at least in the hands of the skilled, leaves your lawn with tasteful stripes. A rotary mower has a single, horizontally rotating blade and is basically a Flymo on wheels. Or if you have a great deal of grass you might treat yourself to a big, happy, ride-on number, if you can afford it. Mine is a self-propelled rotary mower of Japanese manufacture (you’ll have heard of the Bank of Origami? Sadly, it folded). It drinks unpasteurised petrol, has one handle you need to squeeze to the hand-bar before the beast will start – an interesting stretch as you obediently squeeze with one hand before reaching for the ripcord with another.

There is a second handle you squeeze to make the mower move forward. The catchbasket hangs off its behind and, every so often, the blade jams on a length of thick grass or delinquent dandelion and you must tip the mower on its side and remove the mush (having first disconnected the spark plug, if you are at all attached to your hand).

And so you march up and down, back and forth, at once in charge and under tow. Two dozen basket-emptying trips later, I do at last have a lawn – patchy, yellow, traumatised and faintly scalped but flat, beaten and battered at last into submission.

In the welcome silence I hear the sounds of other men mowing, for we males instinctively seem to hit our lawns at the same hour. Creaking, just a little, I put everything away once more – and ponder the possibilities of a patio.