splendour in the grass
an experimental indigo vat
Though they may be pleasant to roll about on, I take a dim view of well-kept lawns. Living in Surrey Hills as a child, Sundays seemed to be filled with the incessant hum of lawnmowers. Some people then filled the streets with acrid smoke, burning piles of clippings (drenched with a deluge of kerosene) in the gutters. The small volcanoes would smoulder for hours and the smell was horrible.
We had a neighbour who spent his spare time either mowing or on his hands and knees grubbing out dandelions and other broad-leafed invaders, trimming the edges of his green patch exactly to the edge of its concrete borders and then sprinkling fertiliser on it to make it grow more. It still makes no sense to me.
Our ‘lawns’ were not so perfect. My father did keep a small patch closely mown, but that was so that we could play croquet on it, and practice cartwheels. The rest of the garden certainly had grass between the mix of fruit trees and flowers and vegetable beds, but that grass was interspersed with daisies, poppies, dandelions and even small wild strawberries with mosses forming a velvety green carpet in the truly shady areas. I think my parents were dreaming of European hay meadows in which marguerites and cornflowers and pink clover and poppies and corncockles all danced in the breeze; while also trying to keep a relatively serpent-free environment for us to play in.
When we went to live in America for a while, the enormous expanses of closely cut green seemed very boring to a small child accustomed to playing in a slightly wilder environment, and later as an adult I found them absolutely horrific. They might be green but otherwise they were deserts in which no insect was welcome.
Germany in 1969 wasn’t much better. There were lovely green parks, sure, but there were also an abundance of signs reading “Betreten des Rasens verboten, Eltern haften für ihre Kinder” (Walking on the grass is forbidden, Parents are legally responsible for their children).
Visiting Berlin forty years later, though, things had changed, at least in Germany. in I was delighted to see that the city had allowed the parks to become sign-free meadows whose edges were overgrown with roses and full of bees and butterflies.
Here on the farm I’d love to grow meadow flowers in between the various kitchen supplies (herbaceous and arboreal) but the insidious Kikuyu grass introduced by some well-intentioned but misguided previous inhabitant is impossible to get rid of. Its roots can even penetrate concrete and I’d have to dig up and sift the soil several feet deep and search for every last tiny bit of root because it can literally propagate from two passing cells (though officially it spreads through vigorous growth by both stolons and rhizomes). Allegedly introduced to Australia from the highlands of East Africa as a robust pasture grass for cattle, it has become the scourge of gardeners due to its invasive propensity to spread both vertically and horizontally. Spraying (not that I would do that) would probably only encourage the stuff. So from time to time I hop onto a ride-on mower and create a few safe places for the mokos (grandchildren) to run about in. By safe I mean that you can see any reptiles before you step on them.
It’s around this time of year, when you can almost see the grass growing in the paddocks, that we keep a special watch on our horses. Escalating sugar levels in the green stuff are not good for them and can lead to laminitis and other complications. Keeping them in a field with longer grass is oddly enough, better than grazing in a short one, as heavily grazed grasses tend to produce higher levels of sugar in order to survive. Our horses have plenty of room to forage, so grass sugars haven’t been an issue as yet, but it’s something I keep in mind.
I was thinking about those sugars a few days ago, and doing a bit of extra reading on the subject I discovered that the highest concentration of sugars in grass occurs in the afternoon, when the plant is building up reserves in order to keep on growing overnight (when photosynthesis stalls). It occurred to me that mowing the lush kikuyu forest in my garden last Sunday afternoon could be useful in more ways than one. Most plant sugars are helpful in reducing indigo, so I gathered up a bucketful of clippings in order to have a play, carefully avoiding the patches of Oxalis pes-caprae (soursobs) given they had made my breath shorten and my eyes water as I rode the mower over them...though perhaps the oxalic acid might also act as a reducing agent, so there’s another possible experiment already waiting in the wings.
