One man went to mow

went to a mow a scintilla of lawn in a suburban back garden / one man and his defecating dog, Jessie ...

…went to mow an unkempt patch of grass punctuated by paving slabs in the uncharacteristically stultifying heat of a late Welsh summer.

Good luck getting that to scan. But yes:

I mowed the lawn.

It wasn’t a burdensome task. It is a relatively small patch of grass, though complicated slightly by the curvaceous nature of its boundary,  edged with a two-brick-high retaining wall for the plant beds at the corners. And there is a large roundel of concrete paving in the middle, centred on a socket for a whirligig clothes dryer, with smaller concrete stepping-stone discs before and beyond it, giving the appearance of an alien landing strip or pattern of crop circles.

I wouldn’t have chosen the structural features of the garden myself. On the other hand, I don’t have the imagination or will to conjure my ideal garden from a blank earthen canvas, so perhaps it’s just as well that it was already in place. On the whole I prefer in most aspects of life to work as far as possible with rather than against entropy, massaging and tweaking and deflecting and, where necessary surfing or sinking into turbulence and degeneration. I imagine the previous owners of the house might be somewhat dismayed by the garden’s  current appearance, with its riot of creeping foliage, excess of still unchopped logs, and total absence of mock-classical statuary.

As it was before I got my hands on it

They were clearly aficionados of order and symmetry. I can enjoy neat, formal gardens. So long as I’m not tasked with maintaining them. A house just down the street from us has a beautiful low square box hedge surrounding a small tree with a neatly topiaried spherical crown. It brings me a little shot of joy every time I walk past it into town. I have never seen the householder emerging from the property but I like to think I would give them a small round of applause if I did so, and that they would affect a modest bow in return.

But our garden is a blessed compromise. I have hacked back viciously two Himalayan honeysuckle plants that threatened to take over completely. I find myself pulling up its progeny, set from gooey purple seeds, from all corners of the garden as they spring up in pots, and crevices in paving, bursting through other plants and threatening to smother them. Pots are scattered piecemeal, a few even contain the plants intended for them: the spindly olive and the black-spotted white rose that somehow survive after coming with us from Doncaster. I have added a flourishing cherry tree, that follows up its day or two of gorgeous spring blossom with a rich crop of fruits that the birds strip within a day, and an aphid ridden, leaf curling apple tree, heavy now with pitted and blighted pomes.

I have tentatively experimented with ‘No Mow May’ but, within a few days, hunting in the mess of the lawn for the mess of our cockapoo’s poo became like looking for a mass of fly-blown stinking needles in a nascent haystack, so I was forced to abandon the plan.  I had a go at leaving a couple of longer patches but the grassed area is too small for that to look like anything more appealing than an accidentally unshaven patch of beard and there was no sign of the bee-and-butterfly-philic blooms that are supposed to make the exercise worthwhile.

So, as a compromise (and because the grass is too long to allow any other option, to be honest) I set the mower blades to their highest. There are bare patches, some of them caused by nitrogen burn from Jessie’s urine, and a larger area scuffed by jackdaws, starlings and pigeons that squabbled on sodden winter earth for fallen seed from the feeder that hung above, when I could be bothered to fill it.

I begin sweating as short strokes of the mower slash through the sod, clogging the spindle every few feet. My bare lower legs itch frantically beneath my shorts as tickly clippings (and presumably, I try not to think, the creatures that had been happily habitant therein) spray wantonly around the cylinder.

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The mower I was using when I started writing this piece some months ago in spring was a cheap hand-push one. I congratulated myself for my green credentials in opting for such a simple manual machine. Perhaps it also reminded me of the one I remember my dad using to cut the postage-stamp of grass in front of mum’s playgroup that had been her dad’s house. I guess it would have been grandad’s mower. But at the weekend I bought a hover mower with a grass collector.

My son had complained about the difficulty of doing the grass while we were on holiday (he did it once, he claims, and I’m just about prepared to believe him). My wife was also sceptical of the push mower’s merits. ‘Shall I mow the lawn?’ she would occasionally say with a sideways glance at the mower that signified, ’Thou shalt mow the lawn.’

I half-heartedly gave it a few shoves through the six-inch sward, still damp down below despite a couple of days’ turn in the Welsh weather from relentless wet to insanely hot, and decided a couple of hours researching alternative garden power tools would be a preferable way to spend the time.

I do like my gadgets and gizmos, however guiltily, so soon, we had a Flymo EasiGlide Plus 330V in the boot of the car, and not-much-less-soon I was wrestling with its serpentine power cord, threatening to electrocute me into the next life as its crude spinning blade tore mercilessly through the grass, ripping it into more or less equal lengths to cruelly expose the unsuccessfully re-seeded bald patches that had hitherto been hidden by the ‘comb-over’ effect that the manual machine allowed by leaving long strands of grass unmolested by its un-aerated scissor-like blades.

Now, three days later, despite an unseasonal start of autumn heatwave, the soil remains moist from the weeks of dank and drizzle while we were steaming in the Far East, so the crop-topped grass blades are pushing skywards again at a rate that is almost visible in this preternatural heat and humidity.

Meanwhile, the push mower sits where I left it at the weekend, just at the edge of the grass, inviting a quick scissor-snip over the surface. The FlyMo, however,  is folded up in the garage, trussed up by its power cable (which needs an extension reel). It will be surely be easier to use the push mower…

… when I’ve finished researching air-conditioning units.