I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a gardener. I don’t deadhead. I don’t prune. I don’t sow, mulch, propagate, or compost. I have never knowingly propagated anything in my life, unless you count panic. The garden and I have an understanding: I leave it alone, and in return, it tries to kill me slowly.
Unfortunately, a garden—much like a teenage boy—cannot be left unsupervised for long. Turn your back for five minutes and it’s sprouting things you don’t recognise, climbing up the fence, and waving seed pods at the neighbours. The grass, in particular, behaves like it’s auditioning for a David Attenborough documentary. Give it a week of sunshine and it turns from lawn to jungle. Birds disappear into it and don’t come out. There are noises in there. Things move. I suspect entire species have evolved under the flower beds.
Which brings us to the weekly ritual known as “mowing the grass,” a term that drastically understates the scale of the endeavour. We live on a hill—correction, the garden is a hill. It rises at an angle that, in mountaineering terms, would require ropes, crampons, and a Sherpa. The mower, which has all the power and grace of a startled cow, refuses to cooperate. It sulks. It jams. It makes suspicious metallic noises and occasionally smokes from places I’m fairly certain aren’t supposed to smoke.
And yet, every weekend, I drag it out like some doomed explorer, determined to tame the wild. I start at the bottom, where the grass is thick, vengeful, and ankle-deep. I lurch forward, mower howling, legs straining, breath wheezing like an old accordion. Halfway up the slope, I experience what can only be described as agricultural despair. Sweat. Grass clippings. Existential dread. I have seen things—unspeakable things—behind the compost bin.
By the time I reach the top, I am fifty per cent lawn clippings, twenty per cent regret, and entirely horizontal.
And here’s the thing: I’m sixty now. I have reached the age where the idea of sitting down with a cup of tea sounds better than most holidays. Mowing the lawn feels increasingly like a game of Russian roulette with nature. One wrong step on that slope and I’m either doing an accidental forward roll into the herbaceous border, or being buried under an avalanche of bindweed.
But I persist. Because if I don’t mow it, the garden wins. And if it wins, it grows. And if it grows, the next time I step outside, I’ll find a toucan nesting in the shed and a scout party from the Amazon basin asking for directions.
So I fight. I mow. I sweat. I curse. And I dream of a day when I’ll simply concrete the whole thing and paint it green.