The revenge of a lawnmower man.
Where we live gardens are of the most importance. Even the name of ‘Southern-Highlands’ seems to evoke gardens. Possibly gardens from Scotland. Indeed, there is a yearly event here whereby the ruddy Scots and their descendents celebrate a festival. Many then wear kilts and play bagpipes. There are also shops that sell stuff related to far away Highlands.
There are items reminiscing of all things England as well. Lots of those interior shops with knots of lavender flowers, lavender sachets, lavender soap, lavender curtains, lavender make up, posies of Queen Anne lace with Babies Breath. All artificial of course but looking real enough for me to touch them, just to make sure. There are endless wreaths which makes me wonder if wreaths serve other celebrations apart from funerals? Some of those are made from twigs cleverly intertwined and very bleached looking. I believe people hang those at the back of bedroom doors. Perhaps a reminder that the party doesn’t go on forever! “Stop mucking around and go to sleep,” the wreath seems to be saying late at night, just when hubby might get a late twinge.
As always there are exceptions to those lush gardens. I noticed an exception on my twice daily walk around the block with Milo. There is one 1950’s free standing solid brick house with just a lawn. Just a lawn and nothing else, no trees, do shrubs, but not a blade of grass out of place, and at dusk the house in totally darkness from the outside. Not even light escaping underneath the front door nor a shimmer through the blinds and curtains. The whole aura of that house is one of ‘spick and span.’
Yet, I know it is occupied. The lawn gets mowed every few days. A solid ruddy looking man in short shorts and with a sloppy hat pushes a lawnmower. He pushes as if his very life depends on it. He greets me with a nod, so there is an ongoing form of communication and I am hoping I’ll pass him just when the mower has run out of petrol or when he is just finished to try and get a bit of his story. I have also noticed in my much earlier Revesby days, that there are gardens that are well kept but the ‘well kept of it’ is just the lawn. There were no trees, no shrubs, no flowers, just a beaten down lawn.
It’s not just the well kept lawn but also the well kept concrete footpaths. The grass is cut to the path with some tool called an edger that cuts through the grass, roots and all and give the edges an almost crew-cut appearance, the concrete path being the ears whereby the grass has been trimmed around.
I can understand an overgrown garden with neglect clearly the culprit. What I find harder to reconcile is that some go through extremes to not have anything growing but also to beat down the growing grass so relentlessly. Is it some kind of revenge? Is it a revenge of the Scot?
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I cut my lawn with a pair of scissors. It’s very small, I made it by gathering up all the stray clumps of grass in the garden and planting them all together. Hard to get it trimmed really short though, with a pair of scissors.
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How big is the patch of green grass Lehan and how long does it take you to cut it with scissors?
Somehow it seems very Japanese, very sendogu?
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I heard today that in Japan they pull every second needle from the pine trees in their garden with tweezers. Cutting the lawn with a pair of scissors sounds like gross Westerner behaviour to me. Unless perhaps they were baby sized nail scissors.
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Hello Gez, I was thinking perhaps rather more along the lines “Stop your ticklin’ Jock” rather than “Stop mucking around and go to sleep.” 🙂
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My Jock doesn’t tickle me anymore. It’s asleep before me.
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Us Australian’s and our bloody lawns!!
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Tutu and I got rid of lawn when we downsized, the best thing we ever did
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This one has deep resonance with me, Gez. Ah, the East Hills line. My Dad was one of those lawn trimmers. Mom struggled to interpose a few random rose bushes. Her prides were her Queen Elizabeth and her Blue Moon. Once I fell off my bike into the rose garden. It made me want to vote with Dad – scorched earth with beaten-down lawn.
But Mom had the last laugh and the garden eventually won out and the mower man never met Dad’s military cut – after Dad passed away.
An unlighted house, you say ? I’m betting a bathtub speed factory or a shuttered hydroponic marijuana plantation. Don’t go too close – especially with lighted pipe 🙂
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Insightful, Emmjay. I do recall passing experience of a house that was a marvel, not a home where the square set of the photo frames on the sideboard representing those far and near and dear could only be matched by the immaculate placement of the crochet doilies under them.
A friend of my recent years admired the way her tenants presented her home and her lawn until the entire garage roof and side wall collapsed into her drive from the weight of a flood and the hydroponics she thus discovered was the main tenant housed. 🙂
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But this story of Gez resonates with me. When I was a wee bairn the family travelled from the north to Brisbane to holiday in the family home-‘Rubislaw’-with my Scottish father’s spinster sister and a bachelor brother (one of two). Uncle Bill who worked in an accountant’s firm in the city managing some area of the business to do with property and land management enjoyed me sitting on the lawn alongside him in the evenings after work and on weekends while he snipped at the edges and unseemly weeds with a small pair of scissors. Thus we spent marvellous hours. 🙂
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It is, shoe! A great occupation!
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Bloody beauty, Gez, it’s sad and comic at the same time, just like life…and that lovely Scottish singing, wow!
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