We get red in the face pushing the mower around week after week, determined to keep the green, green grass of home in check. Instead of treating it like the rest of our landscape plants and encouraging flowers, fruit and seeds to be set, we thwart its sex drive again and again with our noisy, violent rounds.
Between beheadings, though, we water the grass like crazy and, several liberally applied times a season, force-feed the lawn, urging the same blades we crewcut into submission to grow, grow, grow.
What's wrong with this picture? Plenty, I think, starting with our schizoid dilemma: do we want the grass to grow, or do we want to make it stop? America's love affair with the lawn borders on a fatal attraction -- though it needn't be that way. Under the guise of beautifying the postwar suburban sprawl that we built in the name of progress, we fell too deeply in love to think clearly. And it goes way beyond the grow/don't grow conundrum.
-- Margaret Roach, garden editor of Newsday and New York Newsday and a long-time organic gardener
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That's exactly what I'd do with my "Lawn" if I had one like yours. Your yard is very cool and I'm breaking some commandment surely by being jealous. I'll have to deal with that.
As for the sad visitor, that was written over a year ago now and I haven't seen her since. I still see minis every so often so maybe I'm just missing her, or maybe it's someone else. Certainly not like before.
Oh, my gosh! The City took my brush pile - I just looked up and out the window. Thank God!
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