The Green, Green Grass of Home

"Spring is sprung, the grass is riz…" and 'riz' it most certainly is, and will be until the nights start drawing in and the first frosts put a stop to it all.  The grass being 'riz' wouldn't be an issue if we could just smile benignly and watch it wave gently in the breeze, but we can't.  We feel compelled to hack it to within an inch of its life, on at least a weekly basis, and grass, being of a hardy and sporting nature, just keeps on coming right back for more of the same treatment.

I once read some research which indicated that the reason we feel compelled to reduce grass to verdant stubble, in this manner, is because of our prehistoric forebears.  Back on the savannahs in Africa, they relished the closely cropped grassland all around them as it meant that they could spot a predator from miles away, thus making popping down for a swift one at the waterhole less of a fraught exercise.  Actually, saying that 'I read some research' makes it sound as if I spend my leisure time poring over academic reports when, in all likelihood, I probably got it from the back of a cereal packet, but it does have the ring of truth to it.  Why else would we insist on surrounding ourselves with swathes of the green stuff which have no practical purpose?  You might argue that a back lawn gives somewhere for the children and grandchildren to play, in the unlikely event of clement weather, and for dogs to do that which dogs must do, but what about those corner plots on the leafier estates which are cursed with large lawns, to the front and sides, with which nothing can be done at all other than to mow the stuff?

You may have gathered that I am not one of life's gardeners.  Lawn mowing is, in fact, about the limit of my horticultural ability.  When, years ago, I owned a flat, the lawn that came with it was more of a curse than a blessing.  I used to put off the evil day of going to mow until I couldn't see my cat any more when he traversed the patch.  With a heavy heart I would then attack it (the lawn, not the cat) with a strimmer (I didn't possess a mower) and reduce the patch to a series of stubbly hillocks for another month or so.

The strimmer, the electric rotary, the hover and all the rest of the motorised mowing paraphernalia are another reason why I dislike grass-cutting.  There used to be something soporific and quintessentially British about the sound of a manual cylinder mower whirring along on a Sunday morning.  It didn't intrude; in fact it enhanced the stillness of a summer's day.  Now, in our neck of the woods, Sundays sound more like an industrial estate on piece-work.  I'm sure you would get more tranquillity in a blast furnace. 

Of course, it is easy to be hopelessly romantic about the old-fashioned mower.  In reality, it had an unpleasant habit of stopping dead in its tracks, for no apparent reason, thus catching the unwary with a rather nasty blow from the handle to the solar plexus.  This could have resulted in the shattering of the Sabbath stillness with a string of obscenities, if the breath hadn't been knocked completely out of the operator.

I'm not advocating concreting over our green and pleasant land.  Well, not any more that we already seem to be doing.  But wouldn't it be good if we could develop a strain of grass that grew to half an inch in height and then packed up?  Perhaps we could genetically modify it with whichever gene is responsible for male pattern baldness, so that we could at least see some benefit from that?  Alternatively, couldn't we, just for once, let the grass grow under our feet?

You can find this and a whole lot more in the new collection of stories available in both print and Kindle editions - 'The Things You See...'