My trusty lawn rake must be 29 years old. My Dad gave it to me, I think, as a birthday present the year Mrs Z and I moved into our first house, which had a garden some 50 feet long by 11 feet wide.
To me, this was paradise. The house I was born in had a much bigger garden and some of my earliest memories are of gardening with my Dad: helping him mow the lawn or plant vegetables, especially radishes. He loved radishes and, by coincidence, so do I.
I retained my love of gardening, as a teenager and adult, and when we bought our first house, I was thrilled to have a tiny patch of lawn and some borders in which we grew 50 or different herbs.
The house we live in now has a much bigger garden space, although when we moved in, much of it was covered by plant-killing membrane, and rocks and stones. We took all these up to discover the soil was dead. I planted several lawns, hedges and trees. At first, our main lawn would get water-logged during a downpour, but over the years all the plants and trees have improved drainage to soak up the water and now we don’t even get puddles. It’s no surprise that there is so much flooding in towns these days, with people and councils chopping down trees, concreting or tarmacking over the soil, and covering it with decking. Only the other week, I saw someone move into a house and – even though it has a garage with another car space as well as unrestricted on-street parking out the front – tear down the garden wall, dig up the lawn and cover it with tarmac. I am against this from an environmental perspective.
Anyway, today I mowed our main lawn and clipped the edges with shears. When you get down close, you discover not just grass but moss, dandelions, daisies, clover and other plants. As you can guess, my lawn is not bowling green standard, but we don’t want it to be. We want a natural cushion where we can sit to enjoy warm dry weather. I never treat it with weedkiller or chemicals, so now we have worms busying themselves all over the garden and lots of insects buzzing around. If we could have more garden, I’d like a wildflower meadow.
And so, after cutting the grass, I gathered it up with the rake Dad gave me. It is somewhat battered now, but it’s still serviceable and I hope it will be for a few years more.
