Pete McMartin – I have an affinity with uncut grass, those blades of grass

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When I was a child, mowing the lawn was the first real task in life.

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My father, an indifferent gardener, loosened the lawn until the grass reached that infallible point where his will to act won out and, instead of cutting it, he cut it, retiring to the sofa.

Desperate, my mother would order me out into the garden, and since we didn’t have the money to buy a gas-powered lawnmower, I pushed our noisy old lawnmower, which, with blunt and rusty blades, wouldn’t work. both cutting the grass and shoveling it. For the really tall mounds of grass that our little lawnmower cowered at, I’d kneel down with a couple of hedge trimmers (this was before the advent of brush cutters) and cut the grass by hand at a low enough height that the the mower could tip over on it.

Adulthood, college, and a big-city apartment brought a break from the gardens, and I spent those carefree years in a world of concrete. Then came the marriage. The grass came back to my life.

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My wife and I rented a small country house in Richmond, next door to her parents’ farm, and both our house and my in-laws’ house came filled with large expanses of lawn, hay fields, and a vegetable garden that needed attention.

It was here that my life of mowing lawns came true. My father-in-law had a big ride-on lawn mower, and I loved the way it macerated everything in its path: the thickets of blackberries that littered the farm, the clumps of withered daffodil stems that sprouted on the lawn after they were done to flourish , the volunteer willows and aspens shooting like spears along the edge of the driveway.

The orchard had apple, pear, and walnut trees, and in the fall, when fruit and nuts covered the ground, I drove through the trees; encased in their golf ball-sized green shells, they banged noisily against fences and outbuildings, terrorizing my in-laws’ horses. He was shooting bullets.

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One summer, my wife and I hosted a company picnic for the Vancouver Sun newsroom staff, and I mowed a baseball field and a garden in my in-laws’ back hayfield. It took three days. It was a hot summer, and on game day, we headed out to the back field with cold beer and wine, as we played, bits of cut hay spattered our shoes and pant legs. The day seemed like something out of a Currier & Ives print, one of those Arcadian moments urbanites rarely experience, and in family mythology it came to be known as The Field of Dreams.

When our children arrived, we moved to a place in the suburbs. I had only a couple of hundred square feet of lawn on the property, and we quickly filled it with a flower garden. However, one peculiarity of our neighborhood was the lack of sidewalks, and the houses had boulevard frontages on which the city, through a civic program, encouraged homeowners to plant trees. Many did. However, when we moved into our house, the previous owner had paved the entire area with asphalt, so I tore it up, hauled it in a truck along with the contaminated soil, and planted a row of cherry trees there. Cherry trees now bloom in late spring, dotting the road with a blizzard of pink petals.

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For two years I tried to establish a carpet of wildflowers under the trees, a lovely idea that turned out to be impossible. After seeding and re-seeding, mulching and fertilizing, the wildflowers refused to bud. The trees thrived, but below them was bare ground on which nothing grew.

I gave up and planted the area with grass. After an endless month in which nothing happened, a green blush appeared on the floor, then a fluff as fine as a teenager’s mustache.

I let it grow. and grow and grow For some indefinable reason, which I suspect has something to do with my age, I love to see that tumult of green that settles under the trees. The tallest of them, unruly tuft-like stems that are laden with seeds, is now past my knees.

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I dare not cut it.

I look at it and imagine a mini-desert into which garter snakes could slither and insects could find a home: a sensibility, perhaps, born of the terrible state of nature as we now know it. And I wonder what an entire city of unmowed lawns would look like, of nature reclaiming the mosaics of earth that we, in our obsessive collective neatness, have tied up. If we as a society ditched the lawn, I wonder what it would do to us?

Now there is something in me that yearns for that rebellion, that letting go and refuting the orderly sterility of the grass with which I have lived all my life. We are all, as Walt Whitman wrote, blades of grass, and at my age, as I approach my return to earth, I feel an affinity with uncut grass, thinking:

What better way to give back to that land that nurtured me and let my scattered ashes help those blades of grass grow tall?

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