Green, green grass of home
The secret to a successful lawn is that it must be strong enough to bully its tormentors into retreat. If only its strength had not cost me my own, laments
Last May, in lieu of a life, I decided to sort out the back lawn. A year and a bit later, the grass is in excellent condition, which we will come on to shortly, and in great depth – but I am not.
The hermetic seal of effective house arrest, it turns out, imposes a kind of suburban Gaia hypothesis upon a garden and its keeper. The rampant infestations that once suppressed the majesty of those fragile blades now eat through me instead.
The secret to a successful lawn, I now know, is that it must be strong enough to bully its tormentors into retreat. Its strength I have bestowed upon it, via my own fair hand, large amounts of chemicals, various maddening bits of industrial machinery and great personal expense. But its strength has cost me my own. I am levelled, and aggressively overseeded with lawn neurosis.
Many men are, it turns out. They live on Reddit, and in bizarre Facebook groups and YouTube channels. But they deserve your pity, not your scorn.
Lawn addiction is terrifyingly hard to escape from, or avoid. Lawn obsessives cannot so easily start up a new life in a Hong Kong high rise or the Kalahari desert, especially in the middle of a pandemic.
And even in such circumstances, grass would still be omnipotent. Traditional routes of escapism are all off limits.
A countryside stroll? No chance.
Even the box-set binge offers precious little respite. Not when you have to fight yourself not to pause the third episode of Ted Lasso to admire the groundsman’s Allett Buckingham ride-on cylinder mower.
Normal life throws up confirmation of your newfound oddness almost hourly. In a fairly recent life, I spent several years working at the Wimbledon Championships for the full fortnight. It is only this year, watching on television, that I found myself first wondering, then speculating upon, then ultimately googling the preferred mowing height and seed mix on centre court (8mm, 100 per cent perennial ryegrass, just FYI. The 30 per cent creeping red fescue was dispensed with in 2001. Makes sense to me).
It is also, it turns out, fairly extraordinary how many climactic movie scenes take place on some form of lawn or another, and
One of the first lessons I learned was not to ask for lawn care advice online
how easy it is for all dramatic tension to be displaced with rising anxiety triggered by a small patch of obvious poa annua that will only spread if it’s not dug out by hand.
Things didn’t used to be this way. Frankly, I wish they weren’t.
I have had a large back lawn for a few years now, as a direct consequence of no longer living in central London. Whether a large back lawn is suitable compensation for a Deliveroo menu that stops after Pizza Express and KFC is a debate for another day – which in this house is every day.
For most of those years, the state of the lawn did not bother me, principally because I had never really bothered to notice it. It was, for the most part, green. It was only one day in April last year that I even spotted, for the first time, that its greenness was not the result of grass, but principally large-scale infestations of what I now understand to be yarrow, lesser trefoil and various other horrors.
One of the first lessons I learned was not to ask for lawn care advice online. If you have a reasonable number of Twitter followers – and the temerity to ask how you might rescue an abysmal lawn – you will quickly, and fairly aggressively be told that the lawn itself is the problem, that you should dispense with all care of it at all and instead establish a wildflower meadow. Think of the bees! There is little point replying that the