LISTEN. I was complaining yesterday, first in a tweet inspired by @MargaretRenkl's appreciation of a new book about turning boring lawns into multiform meadows, and later in class, about the lawn mowers next door upsetting my calm and disrupting my attempt to record a video. And then, they showed up in our yard. Good opportunity to practice what I've been preaching about stoicism, patience, ataraxia and all that.
I was still complaining, in Environmental Ethics, and musing about why it is that we've bought in to the whole lawn aesthetic. Why don't we all let a hundred flowers bloom, figuratively speaking? Why don't we let our grounds become the gardens they could be, let them grow and multiply and variegate, let our flora flourish, let our non-conformist freedom flags fly?
Then I recalled reading Michael Pollan's first book Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, back in the early '90s before he became our leading authority on the ethics of food, farm policy, and the challenges and opportunities that accrue to omnivores like most (still?) of us. And, I recalled how much I used to hate riding the lawn on that "infernal machine" that left my nerves jangled and my mind in disarray. Pollan understood.
“Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.
Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
Sisyphus on a Zero-Turn John Deere, the "whole doomed process."
Ed said he loves it. I don't. This one tests the limits of my pragmatic-pluralistic sensibilities, but okay. To each their own. Just think, though, how much more interesting our landscapes would be if we gave up the collective unspoken conspiracy against lawn diversity. Bio-diversity. We've got to get ourselves back to the meadow. Let's cultivate our garden.
Dr. Oliver, for me mowing the lawn is not so much a continuous struggle to keep the grass and weeds at acceptable heights so we can walk through them, but more of an opportunity to stimulate my heart and exercise my muscles. My mowers are push mowers and are not self-propelled. If I divide my lawn into three sections, I am assured of getting a good forty-five minutes of exercise for three days, and I am outdoors and can use the time to reflect on what I have been reading or studying. There are times when I see wild flowers that I hesitate to mow and will occasionally mow around them for a week or so. If I were given the choice to walk on a treadmill or ride an exercise bike for forty-five minutes or mow the lawn, I'd opt for mowing which is why I miss it from late fall to early spring.
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