The Art Of Mowing

I used to mow my father's lawn. I remember the arduous task of bringing the lawnmower to life. This required pulling on a rope repeatedly until it engaged a spring-loaded rotor, which in turn rotated the engine's flywheel and crankshaft, initiating the combustion process. Once the engine started, the recoil starter disengaged, allowing the engine to run independently. It made quite a racket and had a lot of power. The yard, front and back, was quite large, so it was a job that took several hours to complete. I was living like Gregory Corso at the time, or John Keats, adepts at couch-surfing. Mowing the lawn was a way to compensate for the kindness of food and lodging provided for the few days, sometimes weeks, it would take to find a job in order to secure an apartment. Rents in Seattle in the 70s were phenomenally cheap. It’s why I moved back to Seattle after ten years in California. The nascent flowering of what would soon be Silicon Valley had already begun driving rents and real estate way up. It would be another ten years or so before the same phenomena would convert Seattle from being one of the most livable of cities to a dystopic hellscape of unaffordable homes, “suicidal” whistleblowers, cratered roads and drones.

The lawn mower was old and stubborn and hard to start. It was the hardest part of the mowing job. I liked the uniformity of the process, the machine vibrating its power in my arms, pulling me along like a mechanical mule, a Martian rover with rotating blades. I liked the combined smells of newly mown grass and gasoline. The strong smell of freshly cut grass is caused by green leaf volatiles (GLVs), quite generally a mix of various oxygenated hydrocarbons, which are released when grass is damaged. In the French movie Perfumes (Les Parfums), Emmanuelle Devos plays a famous French “nose” who can discern with acute sensitivity a universe of odors. She refers to the smell of newly mown grass as the smell of carnage. I would, as a rule, mow the lawn in orderly strips, going back and forth, lost in thought. When I was finished mowing, I would rake. Raking took a lot longer. But there was something Zenlike in the motion, a meditative rhythm.

Lawns appear to be disappearing. A lot of the new McMansions use every square inch of property, leaving room for little else but a few rocks and some beach grass. A number of luxurious dwellings use artificial turf, which I find quite off-putting. Why would anyone do that? Grass is not a rare metal. It’s everywhere. It does require water. But this is Seattle. It rains a lot.  Mowing, it would seem, has lost its allure for a lot of homeowners. Many yards now have been landscaped to accentuate rocks and moss. The effect is enchanting. The larger homes, the ones upwards of two million, will quite often have a fountain and a statue of the Buddha, seated in a lotus position with a benevolent smile and a large well-exposed belly, soliciting a rub for good luck. I find this curious. That people blessed with wealth should allude to an eastern philosophy whose tenets advance non-attachment, deliverance from our enslavement to material possessions, even within our thoughts and emotions. Is this because once wealth is attained, it seems only natural to despise it? Does the effort to acquire wealth have a damaging effect on the psyche, recommending that a Buddha should be seated strategically somewhere in the garden, ideally near a fountain, as a talisman to the further grip of the material world, or as a warning to people not to seek wealth and property, it’s just a headache, an ongoing anxiety? Wouldn’t a more apt religious figure be someone espousing a gospel of joy and prosperity, the idea that God rewards faithfulness and devotion with material wealth and success, or one of many celebrities hosting meditation videos on YouTube, Sam Harris or Kevin Hart? A Buddha in a lotus position does, I must say, look far better suited to a setting of lobelia, elephant ears and water hyacinth than a podcast celebrity smiling sagely out of a backdrop of bugleweed, spirea and stinking hellebore.

It was British engineer Edward Beard Budding that we have to thank for the invention of the lawn mower. It seems appropriate that Budding, who worked as a mechanic building and repairing machinery for textile mills in the Stroud valleys, that the words ‘beard’ and ‘budding’ should constitute the bulk of his name. Budding was granted a patent for the first mechanical lawn mower in 1830. The machine was based on a tool used to uniformly cut carpet and comprised of a series of blades around a cylinder. Cast-iron gear wheels transmitted power from the rear roller to the cutting cylinder, allowing the rear roller to drive the knives on the cutting cylinder. It must’ve been a hell of a thing to push. Lawn sports like croquet and lawn tennis had become quite popular in England, as well as in the U.S. By the mid-19th century in America lawns were firmly established as a signature of the prosperous American homeowner’s landscape. However, it was evident in the Flintstone cartoons that the prehistoric Flintstones had a grassy front yard with a cobblestone walkway and a driveway, as well as a grassy backyard with a pool and a coconut tree, thus belying the lawn as an eccentricity of the industrial age.