Lawn
"Young lady," he hitched up his wide belt "I don’t suppose you remember anybody clipping hedge with hand-shears?" He glanced at her up-turned face. "Heck, I remember pushing a reel-mower all afternoon in the hot sun. I suppose the next thing to go the way of canasta might be lawn. Fine by me. But as long as we got it to deal with, knowing how it grows is a real help. Growing and mowing are the two main things you ought to understand.
"Grass grows in two fashions." He led her along the wide greenway by the long flower-bed, stopping casually by the ornamental stone. "Yeah, I carved that two years ago. Nobody reads Matthew Arnold any more, either."
"And can this fragrant lawn
With its cool trees, and nights,
And the sweet, tranquil Thames,
And moonshine, and the day,
To thy rack’d heart and brain
Afford no balm?"
"Philomela"
Matthew Arnold
"Y’see, by fertilizing in September, you won’t produce any immediate result, nothing visible, that is. But nitrogen laid on about then stimulates the grass plant to produce a tremendous amount of the underground buds we call ‘tillers.’ Next spring, those buds come up as shoots and thicken your lawn to cover up bare patches and crowd out the weeds. If you can only fertilize once, do it in the late summer or early fall. Oh, sure, spring fertilization will green-up the yard and stimulate those buds into more rapid growth, but then you got to cut it more often, don’t you?
"Jimmy ought to be down in a minute. Just come over here and look at this section where I actually had to use weed killer to get rid of Canada thistles that were coming up right in the middle of the lawn." They ambled along.
"Look at that, clean as a baby’s ... uh, whistle. Early autumn’s the time to apply weed-killer, too, if that’s the way you got to be. Dandelions, and so forth, draw sugars down into their roots for winter storage about then and herbicide goes right along, destroying your broad-leafed perennials to the last root. But you got to consider, especially at your age– when each of my kids got to fourth grade, we had the wild flower collection to do. Naturally, Mrs. Hoard always gave out the assignment right after the snow had melted in March and the field-flowers like daisy and corn flower would be dead as campaign finance reform. But, by crawling along, our field guide in hand, we always found more than forty wild flowers. The back is a regular mosaic–more of a mown-meadow than a regular lawn–coltsfoot, pussytoes, the bulbous buttercup and Jill-over-the-hill. Mighty small, maybe, but qualifiers every one in the wildflower stakes, and pretty enough in their way, if you look at them right-. Herbicide would’ve given us a much more monotonous lawn. And you wouldn’t want your children to fail fourth grade. I mean, someday, if you and Jimmy...well, someday." He cleared his throat loudly when a thought struck him.
"Let me give you a word of assurance–those lawn care programs available through commercial fertilizer companies, where a bag of this and a bag of that are to be spread over the grass at prescribed intervals–they really do work." He could see she was surprised at this. "But they’re pricey. If you just want to get on with the more interesting aspects of gardening," and he didn’t figure her for one of those lawn fanatics, "producing a three pound tomato or primping your entries for the truss show–then the spring-and-fall, two-shots-of-lawn-food-a-year system works pretty good." They’d reached the end of the garden and he guided her to turn back along the other side.
He laughed. "There’s them who like to mow and them that hate it. Nature or nurture, nobody knows for sure. Jimmy always used to like it, when he was younger." He noticed that his voice had gotten a little wistful and so he went on briskly. "But best results come from mowing short in the cool of spring and fall, and mowing long in the heat of summer. Strong sun can actually burn the crowns of grass plants. I don’t know if you knew that. It’ll kill stems or even the whole thing in broadloom patches." She shook her head encouragingly, to show that she hadn’t know it.
"So what’s short and what’s tall? I used to think, when the kids did the mowing, that waist-high was getting on for tall. But down the garden center word is that around two inches’ll do for medium. One inch is so short that only some of the varieties of fescue they use on golf-greens can take it. If you’d rather not bother to check your lawn depth against the Fahrenheit scale, the taller setting on your mower’ll do for all seasons. But," he paused for emphasis, "the more frequently you mow the more likely your yard is to be looking its best. Short clippings disappear right into the ground, instead of rugging-up and smothering patches of grass. Tall grass, cut short, looks open and stemy and gives weed seed the light it needs to germinate.
"When I was a kid in the city, some people used to have their steep front yards cemented-over, can you imagine. One lady had artificial-grass carpet installed. I mean, it would have been a lot more satisfying to put in a woodland garden, or a meadow, maybe an English cottage garden, all busy with flowers, or even one of them Japanese-style gardens, though back then that would’ve been going pretty far. I tell you, lawn is a Georgian conception, the product of a sheep-herding culture. If sheep grow like the shepherd, young lady, it may be that lawn may eventually go the way of the sheep, and we won’t have it hanging about in the yard at all.
"Here’s Jimmy. About time, kid. But we had a nice talk while you were fooling around upstairs. Off y’go! Where y’headed?"
While Jimmy held the door to the sedan, she turned back to him, "We’re going to a Bluegrass concert." she said. "You ought to come. I’ll bet you’d like it."
"Aw, go on, you kids. I don’t know the first thing about it."
appeared September, 2001