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Grasses and Lawns

© Barbara Hall

The way I see it, lawns are little more than manipulated meadows. I mean REALLY. Does this make sense? You feed and water the lawn so it GROWS and then what do you do? You cut it down! Over and over, all season long. Make it grow, cut it down, make it grow, cut it down. Hmmmm. Sounds like you don't have enough to do.

Years ago I heard one of those wise sayings - that the easiest way to have a green lawn was to lay dollar bills down side by side....

More than once I have been asked if I know about flowers, and then promptly was asked a lawn question. It happened again just the other day. Only the question this time was whether this guy could use MORE "weed and feed" right now and since the guy at the nursery said he shouldn't, could he use MIRACLE GRO on the lawn. My eyes glazed over. OK, Jack here's the deal. If you pump your lawn full of Miracle Gro you are going to produce a junkie of a lawn that starts to act up as soon as the Miracle Gro wears off. You produce a lawn that has little capability of caring for itself. First stress that this will most likely cause major problems. HOWEVER, if you feed it a good, balanced, slow-release organic lawn food that stimulates root growth as well as builds the soil, you'll have a really strong lawn that can handle all kinds of stuff. Now HIS eyes were glazing over. And so it goes.

Frankly, I much prefer grasses. The grace, the texture,the MOVEMENT of grasses waving their seed heads in the breezes this time of year is such a delight. I live on a large farm and much of it is hay fields. Haying has just begun and row by row the tractor goes back and forth, leveling all the swaying grasses and eventually making them into square bales. In fields not yet cut the breezes run their fingers through the soft silver grasses making entire huge hillsides seem to be breathing. That's some of the most magical stuff there is.

My house is cluttered with odd bottles full of grass flowers and seed heads. I have even made hair wreaths out of field grasses and hung great long sheaves of grasses from the curtain rods. It's nice to see that ornamental grasses are breaking into the mainstream gardening scene and we have an editor here at Suite 101 who writes about just that, but my favorites are the ones which dance around in the fields and along the roadsides.

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