Lawns

Aren’t lawns just bloody dandy. There’s nothing quite like walking down the streets of your pristinely up kept suburb, marvelling at every man’s little slice of Sir Walter’s finest. The lush, fresh fields of your suburban paradise, lining the sidewalk, lining the streets and lining the minds of every proud backyard owner with pride, pleasure and satisfaction.

All so wrong and all simply the misguided pipe dreams of your average pathetic homeowner.

Your dream.

Take a good hard look at yourself you terrible, terrible turf-laying, seed-sewing, grass-mowing dimwit. You just signed yourself up for a lifetime of spine wrenching labour, endless watering and a horrific battle between yourself and all manner of things trying to kill your lawn – and maybe you afterwards. You don’t have to go far to see that having a lawn is a terrible mistake – just look at the chemicals section of your local garden centre. You will end up spending copious amounts of money on its upkeep. You will end up wasting months of your life on it. And after all these trials and tribulations, you will have to do it all over again.

Yes, the garden centre or landscape supplier makes lawn ownership look very attractive. They have the nice little display down there, a metre squared of every imaginable type of grass, they have Couch, they have Kikuyu, they have Durban and Zoysia and Ryegrass and of course, the staple of the Australian backyard, Buffalo. You stand there, marvelling at this immaculate piece of grass, wearing your shorts and your white t-shirt with an odd stain down the front from some of your other weekend pursuits. You’ve got the keys to your BMW in one hand, your Blackberry in the other and you’re only here because you’re trying to get your mind off not only your fear of retrenchment but the fear of your wife and kids – the fear that they will hate you if you do not have the nicest, prettiest, most impressive piece of lawn in the whole suburb.

What you don’t know is that they actually have someone employed full time to keep their little turf display looking so tempting. That same person will greet you, smile, and talk proudly about his or her little pride and joy, their turf display they labour over so much. They will tell you to take off your shoes and walk on their turf, feel the softness of the greenleas couch, feel the sponginess of the ST85 buffalo, and feel the happy balance which is struck between the two by the unconquerable kikuyu. You, the unwary, dare I say, stupid gardener fall victim to this sweet siren song that the turf man or woman sings to you in tones not only that you can hear, but tones which resonate at such a frequency that even the grass can hear it – and love it.

He will make you buy his turf.

You will ask questions; you will say that someone you know has Sir Walter buffalo and that they say it is the best one. The turf man or lady will agree. They will also say there is a price break at 100m2, and that the supplier will deliver it directly to you. They smile, shake your hand; take your money at a rate of $11.50 a metre squared. You leave feeling good. Feeling like you’ve really done something, like your life is finally going to come together after years and years of a mysterious absence you could never really put your finger on.

And so that tremendous day finally arrives. You see that truck you’ve been dreaming about, it pulls up at your driveway; it has thousands and thousands of rolls of turf on it. You think the truck driver has the greatest job in the world, being so close to all this turf! Wow, he must have an amazing lawn, you think. He is your new God. The God of the Lawn. And you must defeat him at all costs.

The turf truck - the object you have been dreaming of since last weekend.

He operates the crane on the truck to bring the pallet of turf onto your driveway. He smiles, gets you to sign, bids you a nice day and is on his way. You are left staring at your mountain of turf. Oh, cock, you think, how am I to get all this turf around the side with my puny, office job muscles, my obese wife who is too busy watching Kerri Anne to do anything else and my little brat children with their heads stuck in an Xbox or something you have no idea about?

And so in earnest, you go to your shed (that you built on a similar Saturday where you struggled for hours to understand the bizarre instructions supplied to assemble it) and retrieve your wheelbarrow. You throw a roll of turf in and go to take it to the backyard, but – your wheel barrow has a flat tire. Luckily, you also have a bike pump in your shed – after all, you do have that bike you bought on a similar weekend and used once and then decided Lycra and being ran over isn’t you thing. You pump your tire, labouring up and down, up and down, movements that you believe will bring you to the enlightened state of having a wheelbarrow with a pumped tire.

What you wish your wheelbarrow looked like.

And so an hour after the turf arrived, you can finally getting moving. But from all that pumping, your back is now sore, as due to the extremely sedentary life you usually lead, you are not used to this sort of violent abuse of your body. And so you go back inside to your obese wife who looks at you and your man boobs in great disdain and promptly gets up to look in the fridge. You sit on the couch and watch the cricket, just to check the score, you say. After a good hour of resting your back, you get a second wind and up you get, up and at ‘em, to lay down that hard-earned lawn.

You charge at that pile of soil and grass that will soon be your lawn, the greatest in the neighbourhood. You lift that first roll and – Oh my God! That is really bloody heavy! You labour so much with it, and drop it into the wheelbarrow nearly throwing yourself in with it. Nevertheless, you persevere with admirable diligence; after all, you didn’t earn this house and your wonderful family by not fighting for them. You manage to get through twenty rolls – with each roll getting just a little bit lighter – before you need a break. After you’ve put down that last roll, you realise something.

You haven’t prepared the backyard for the turf.

Oh my God, is what you are thinking. Billy’s toys are everywhere; this isn’t soil, it’s dirt. I need to cultivate this whole patch. How will I ever get through all this myself?

You decide to regroup inside over a beer and a dry turkey sandwich – made begrudgingly and rather poorly by your lovely, size 42 wife. You thank her as she struggles around the kitchen weighed down not only by her disgusting eating habits, but the feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction that marrying such an anonymous, boring husband and submitting herself to the meaningless life of an upper-middle class housewife – too rich to work, not rich enough to be extravagant – has left her with. You haven’t been able to look her in the eye and say she is beautiful since you got married – since that glimmer and shine that was once in her eyes died, like your lawn is about to.

After much deliberation, you decide to abandon the pursuit yourself and to get some landscapers in to do the job – and do it properly. You get on the phone and call every landscaper in the yellow pages. You eventually find one who is willing to start the job that afternoon. You thank him most gratefully and eagerly await his arrival.

Well, you did call every landscaper...

He arrives around one o’clock in the afternoon. His name is Deano, so you know he must be good. He owns and operates Deano’s Landscapes and Garden Care. Wow, he owns a business. That’s more than what you can say for yourself, you helpless corporate slave with your despicable little tie and your pathetic little cubicle and your stupid little title. You can’t even lay a roll of turf for Christ’s sake. Deano has a look around, yup, the land needs work, he says. He quotes you for the job. $1500! My God Deano, is that right? Yup, that’s right, says Deano. But for you, says Deano, I’ll do it for $1350. Ok Deano, you’ve sold me, you will say.
He starts by himself, and says that tomorrow he will bring a few of his boys to help out. He turns over a fraction of the land and then he is finished for the day. He says that you should probably buy some good topsoil for the lawn or it might die. Oh my god. This fucking lawn, you are thinking. So you get on the phone, quickly as the landscape place closes in 10 minutes. You beg and squeal for your topsoil. You plead with the operator over the phone to get it to you first thing in the morning. He says yes.

First thing in the morning (7 am) and Deano and his boys are there, digging up your backyard. Your wife is pissed off at you because there is a bunch of mysterious men searching for treasure in the backyard during Oprah. No darling, it’s just the landscapers, you say. Go back to your mind-numbing talk show bollocks.

Deano comes and asks. Where is the topsoil? Ah those stupid bastards, you think. They said first thing in the morning! You get on the phone and ask where the topsoil is. The responder says something about it being next on the run and it shouldn’t be too long. Deano and his boys are waiting around, apparently bored of looking for treasure, but they are actually waiting for the topsoil.

Pirates will invade your backyard thinking there is a treasure hunt.

Eventually it arrives (at 12pm) and Deano and his boys start laying the turf. They spread the topsoil, they unroll seemingly endless amounts of turf. Oh, it is beautiful. Oh, it is finally coming together, you think. You watch as your life is rolled out on top of a fresh layer of nature’s finest soil. The beauty of it all nearly overwhelms you, so you go and masturbate quickly to pass the time.
Unfortunately the horny Asian housewives being done by brutal Black ex-gang member’s porn website you normally frequent is undergoing maintenance, so you make do with a co-workers Facebook pictures.

By 5pm it is all done. Your life is complete. Deano thanks you, says he will send you a bill, you congratulate him on a job well done and give him and his boys a case of beer to share. That makes you feel like you’re really giving something back.
You go to bed with your whale-wife, feeling content for the first time in years. You have a lawn. Tremendous. It’s all done. I’ll never have to worry about that again.

Oh, my dear man, how wrong you are.

A month later, the grass is getting mysterious brown circles . You go to the landscape place, they say you have army worm. Yes, there has been a particularly harsh outbreak of it lately. They are sold out of Professor Mac’s 3 in 1 which would solve that problem. Come back next Thursday. So you do, and you fork out your $22 hard earned dollars and go home and hose it on. Lovely.

Your lawn if you don't mow it twice a day.

Six months after that, it’s going brown again. Apparently you have to fertilise it or it dies. Oh god. This lawn is non-stop, you are thinking. I’ve already had to buy a lawn mower and sprinkler system to keep it looking nice. I’ve spent hundreds on weedkillers to keep it all just grass and not bindis and clover and wintergrass. This is terrible.

And the saga goes on. The grass goes purple in winter; heavy rain causes large patches to rot and die; the dog has been digging it up; army worm has struck again; particularly shady patches have died and won’t grow back. You can’t be bothered to mow the lawn yourself so you pay someone $300 a month to mow it for you. Billy has gotten a strange rash from it, your wife gets hay fever because of it. Your blood pressure has been up recently. Your dog itches and scratches itself raw every week from allergies and you regularly find ticks on it. The vet says that you should make sure the dog doesn’t get any more ticks, so it stays inside and has taken to pissing all over your clothes. Worst of all, your neighbour’s think you’re a deranged psychopath who is obsessed with his lawn the way you carry on about it. There goes your dream of being the pride of the suburb.

Your dog if you own a lawn. Note absence of hair everywhere except behind the head.

It consumes hours of your life every week regardless. The endless struggle between you and your lawn has taken its toll on you. You are tired, restless, overwhelmed by the responsibility which has been leaning increasingly heavily on your shoulders lately. You can’t take the pressure. You can’t handle it any longer. You no longer care that you have a patch of lawn that is the pride of the neighbourhood, a patch of lawn which your neighbours envy and which nearly got your house into Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

So you call up the landscape place and ask for the full paving package, with the biggest, heaviest pavers you can find, forever immortalised into your backyard in a sea of concrete, never to be removed, not while you’re around, at least.

And now, every night, you go to bed and thank God that Adbri make an 80mm thick paver to crush your lawn, and you also thank God that you don’t have to mow it.

If that’s not enough reason to stop admiring and start hating lawns, then I don’t know what is.