One (wo) man went to mow

Today

I ache all over. I've been spending the last two days trying to sort out Lizzie's back garden. Why she chose to buy a house with about 80ft of garden when she hasn't a green digit anywhere is a mystery. I suspect she had fantasies about friends, Pimms and barbecues, but forgot that grass needs managing.

Seeing the grass for the first time last year and that it was a lawn, overgrown but manageable, I bought her a decent Flymo and did the first cut. "Just do this about every 2-3 weeks throughout the summer" I said, without much hope "and it'll stay in shape". So Lizzie had a go a few weeks later. Anxious that she might kill a frog (frogs can move really fast) she lost concentration and sliced through the cable. No problem - friend X would sort it - which he did but not before the winter.

The mower languished, some of the time outside where the electrics fused and the plastic fittings became brittle. An attempt to cut the grass this summer resulted in pure frustration, so the meadow flourished like the wicked and the green bay tree and the mower lost hope, standing on the patio during one of the wettest summers on record. Lizzie began to fantasise about finding lost ruins in the grass - more Mayan than Inca - but what we actually found were bedsprings and garden implements whose function was obscure, but whose capacity to wreck the mower blades was unparalleled

"Stop being so proud and let your parents help" says I "It's what we're for." Which is how I found myself wrestling with 3ft high tussocks of grass. We did give in and buy a new Flymo and some proper shears. I sank low enough to accept the help of the neighbour's small children. They really enjoyed heaving up armfuls of grass and putting it in the sacks.

In My Day

The lawn at the back of 4 Beulah would have put Lizzie's to shame. While Chris was still sorting out maths and spatial awareness he calculated that the lawn was 100 yards long. He might have exaggerated but it sometimes felt that it might be miles long.

While we did have a cleaning lady, Tillie Lawrence by name, to look after the common parts of the house, we never seemed to rise to gardening help. When the grass got too long there would be a family expedition to tackle it. Shears were used to hack away the worst bits and then it was mowed. For many years we just had a manual rotary mower. Now, I've got one of these but it mows about 10 square feet of lawn. But of course the lawn at 4BH was far too much for such a feeble machine. Anything stronger than the finest blades of grass it just ignored so that the lawn always had an arrogant parade of spindly stalks. We had a grass rake called a "springbok" which took nerves of steel to use. (it was long years before I realised that that it was a brand name and that springboks were actually antelopes.)

Finally Daddy gave in and bought a "motor mower". This petrol driven beast was started by pulling on an ignition rope. Mostly the mower failed to start. If it did it took off down the lawn with you hanging desperately to the handles as it wove its own way through the grass. The lawn at 4BH was never of that perfectly smooth type with lovely lines that you saw on the adverts. Once Daddy lost a pair of shears in the long grass. He said that he had a supernatural experience, with the shears summoning him to their location in order to find them.

I think that gardening generally at Beulah Hill was a spasmodic affair driven by the fear of being completely overtaken by vegetation, rather than by a love of horticulture, or even tidiness.

So I'm truly fascinated by my brother's plans to have a fully ornamental garden at his place - with knot garden and herb garden, like a Chateau on the Loire. Now that's really bucking the trend.