Letting the Grass Grow

One year to seed, seven to weed. That’s an old gardeners saying. It means get those weeds out before they flower and seed, or you’ll spend the next seven years digging out their progeny. 

I see dandelions and buttercups in my garden beds and I want to slice off the flowers before they go to seed. I want to grab the spade and dig them up and rid the garden of them. I feel that way even though I have consciously chosen to allow these previously unwanted plants.

When you feel called to set out on a new path, letting go of the old can be hard. Neural pathways are like literal pathways—we automatically want to walk the same way, do the same thing, servant to the same old voice in our head.

I’ve been finding ways to see weeds everywhere and not recoil. I need ways to move past the voice in my head that cries neglect! laziness! disorder!

It helps to remember that I am letting the grass grow, rather than just “not mowing the lawn”. It helps to stop calling it “the lawn”, actually.

Lawn comes from the Middle English word "launde" which originally meant “unwooded field” and referred to a glade in the woods. Launde grew where trees did not. I doubt very much that it was mown, expect perhaps by grazing animals.

Some of the earliest man-made lawns were around medieval castles in France and Britain. They were areas kept free of trees so that guards had an unobstructed view of people approaching. The rise of lawns after that is a complex mixture of industrialisation, colonialism, garden fashion, classism, the rise of the suburbs, and good old marketing. 

I read through this potted history of the lawn and my heart kept returning to ‘launde’. Unwooded field. Glade. A place between trees. 

I’m not against lawns. In fact, there are still areas of our place that I do mow. And the areas that I am letting grow are neatly bounded by mown edges, because right now it helps me to remember that this shift is about intention, not dereliction, and allowing something new, rather than rejecting something old.

This letting-things-go is part of a wild experiment—holding things more lightly, intervening less. I thought it was all about noticing what was going on out there on the land. I didn’t expect that at least half of the experiment is what is going on in here (*points furiously at own heart space*). It’s not just the mental shift from gardening to guardianing (thanks to Mary Reynolds for that beautiful phrase), but a certain kind of loosening inside me. 

I feel incredibly different in this garden now. I feel different about the garden itself—I can see its personality, it’s own life force, as opposed to my imposed idea of what it should be like. But I also feel differently myself when I am in the garden. My role is different, I belong in a different way. I am not responsible for what is happening here. There are no demands on me. I can be in the garden without a background list of jobs to do. I take no credit for what is blooming or booming, or the wildlife that now calls it home. I am here without agenda, without cause. 

I have shrunk inside my garden. It is growing up around me. We are entangled.

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