Lawnmower despotism

Clover from my childhood 

"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."
--Michael Pollan

I last mowed my lawn a few days before I left for Scotland.  I left for Scotland one month ago today.  Do the math.  It needs mowing.

But not as much as you might think.  In Seattle, lawns grow like, well, like weeds from March through May.  They grow slowly into July.  Then, if not watered, they dry up and await the inevitable rains of autumn.

So my lawn looks shaggy, with odd things growing out of it.  But it doesn't look like a hay field, as it would have in April if I'd skipped mowing it for a month.

Letting your lawn do its own thing -- freeing it from Pollan's "totalitarian rule" -- has its own pleasures.   First, there is the daily execution of the dandelions.  In spring, the dandelions grew close to the ground.  Between mowings, I'd go out and pluck the flowers before they went to seed, wondering if this would somehow cause dandelions to give up and go elsewhere (it doesn't). 

But in June -- and I'm no botanist, so don't ask for explanations -- the dandelions grow high before blooming.  Perhaps 18 inches to two feet high.  Overnight.  Literally. And they put out buds several days before the buds flower.  This gives me the opportunity to, as it were, nip them in the bud.  The occasional stalk with bud does occasionally escape my notice, and puts forth a defiant flower.  In a sense, this plant has beat me at my game, but it pays a high price.  Instant decapitation.

But life in the back yard isn't all life and death.  I also observe plants that I never see when I cut the yard regularly.  The hardy blackberry vine, whose struggles to survive I've discussed in past posts, slyly begins poking up in places.  The lawn becomes a carpet of small white clover flowers.  Various plants resembling wheat or other grains thrust up delicate stalks.  Buttercups abound, mistaken from a distance as offensive dandelions.  Prehistoric-looking horsetail ferns spread upward and outward, reminding me of playtime in open fields as a child. 

But most interesting of all -- and most reminiscent of childhood -- are the large purple flowers of a certain type of clover.  Flowers that offer a Mecca to delighted bumble bees -- bumble bees who I otherwise rarely see in this neighborhood, but who appear out of nowhere in appreciation of my rare purple clover.

But alas!  This blog posting has been written as only one more form of procrastination.  Today, the lawn gets leveled, the flowers fall, the bees disappear.  Ecology takes another hit. 

Totalitarian rule is once more imposed.