Grassed off

I cut the grass today, having only cut it two weeks ago. The trouble with grass in Spring and Summer is that once you cut it, it grows again, in a furious game of catch up - 'I must be the length I was before, I must be the length I was before,' is its repeated mantra, and, more often than not, it succeeds, and often exceeds.

Cutting the grass chez nous is a truer phrase then 'mowing the lawn'; the latter implies there is a lawn to start with, a nice, measured and refined variety of grass that knows when to slow down, that enough is enough, that it is time to await the trim reaper before allowing itself an extra growth spurt. Here, in the damp conditions that exist beneath our soil, it grows and grows like nobody's business. Indeed, if we had a business like our grass, we'd be very successful.

Nor for us the neatly defined patch, to be mowed within inches of its life into serried stripes, though I sometimes envy those with such a geometrically configured space of herbage. Ours is a raggle-taggle garden, randomly treed, with humps and bumps and holes, curves and swerves and branches of trees in the way, 'neath which one has to duck to achieve the maximum reach of the arm holding the mower. In such a garden, it's always a delight to hear the screams of delight of the discovery of the hidden grove, soon followed by the screams of pain as the hidden nettle patch is discovered immediately thereafter. Good job we know where the hidden growths of dock are to be found, dock leaves being a much quicker, efficacious and less pungent solution to nettle stings than vinegar, despite the green stains left in their wake.

I don't like cutting the grass. More to the point, I don't like the preparation. We have two large dogs (on the whole, lovely, two Labrador brothers, two years old), penned in by a ground level electric wire and battery-powered collars, so they cannot escape the grounds in order to chase cars, tractors and other agricultural machinery that passes by (you know what's coming, don't you?). Of course, they do what they have to do within the confines of the wire, which means in the mowable area, so I have to go round with a bin bag and a rubber glove before I mow, collecting the various deposits. I have, however, learnt a useless bit of information; that dogs can't digest sweetcorn any more than we can. Nor cotton, having discovered that Youngest was not to blame for the disappearance of my freshly lauindered hankie for a blindfold for the kittens (don't ask).

In the play I have just done there is a line: le nez dans une crotte de chien, elle refuserait de reconnaître l'odeur* I, cutting the grass, frequently had no option but to recognise it. As I walked along pushing, or sometimes being dragged behind, the standard petrol mower (no swish ride-on here with our mangled patch) I inevitably came across some of the aforementioned deposits that I had missed in the preparation phase, usually just as the mower passed over them and as the grass-catcher needed emptying. And it doesn’t matter what age they are, the pong is still the same once the dried crust is broken (sorry for this scatological interlude).

Abandoned toys are also a hazard in the long grass, as they spin off into the borders. Many are the one-legged Action Men about the garden now, staggering from perilous mission to perilous mission: “Quick, men, hop this way, it’s that nightmare helicopter again!” Unarmed, unlegged and dangerous, or at least very annoyed. Their jeeps and Land Rovers, too, painted with camouflage paint; you only know you've hit one when you hear the blades complain as they hit it and you see it spinning off to the side, often one wheel the less. And while sticks and stones may not often break my bones, mild injury to uncovered parts of the anatomy is always a risk as they are encountered and shot out at great speed. Always cut the grass in wellies is my motto.

It has to be done, though. Eldest is coming back from her Polish trip tonight and we would hate her to think that we had done nothing in the way of garden maintenance since she left, albeit less than a week ago. It is also true that the longer it is left, the longer it takes to wrestle back into some sort of semblance of tidiness. And, despite not liking the cutting of it, there is great satisfaction in seeing the end result, the taming of the wilderness.

I have discovered that the French expression for a well-kept lawn is un gazon anglais, gazon being French for lawn. Here, the grass is far from being anglais, so we see it as another effort at integration into French life. And, having said that, I’ll cut it there.