The sound of lawn mowers is so annoying. The sound alone is enough to make me roll my eyes. The world-wide announcement that another lawn is getting a butch cut is even more troublesome.
Close-cut lawns look so awfully strange and unnatural to me. How did we get obsessed with a well-manicured lawn. I doubt that the grass appreciates it. I certainly don’t.
It means that the gardener must use special care, applying fertilizers and weed control agents because the grass is struggling to maintain some semblance of a happy life. It keeps getting cut back again and again as it struggles for light and uses up stored energy to put out the growth it needs for survival.
I look at a well manicured lawn and I hear tiny voices crying out “Feed me, give me something to drink.”
I like to let my grass simply grow. I occasionally, a couple times a summer, run my mower over my lawn to clip off the straggly shoots of grass. My mower is not too sharp and I can set it at a height well above most of the lounging grass petals. Some of those stalks standing up tall get clipped from time to time.
I like the soft and wavy look of a lawn that has been turned into a garden of grass. Having a spreading lawn of grass that is faintly reminiscent of a putting green is as disturbing as plastic play-food. It shouts out a message of obsessive control that the lawn-keeper proclaims to the neighborhood. There may be some kind of satisfaction for the lawn-keeper, but not much joy.
I like my grass to grow like the rest of my garden. I hardly ever trim the petunias to keep them “looking nice” and I feel the same about my grass. I think the the fescue has taken over lots of my grassy yard, thankfully. I sometimes have to craw around on the ground and pull out unwelcome plants, much as I do the rest of my garden. But the grass mostly just grows, flops over, looks lazy. I don’t demand that it stand up at attention so that I can keep it properly trimmed.
I leave that kind of unnatural behavior to those neighbors who have those annoying mowers that they seem to be obsessed with running.