scrantling

Today we began to tackle the long grass in the back garden.  We have two lawns which receive only an annual cut in the autumn, the daffodil lawn by the house, and the bottom lawn, where a mown path runs round the edge, but all the rest is a sea of waving grass for most of the year, or, as at the moment, a brown, almost scalped patch.

I like long grass.  I like the fact you can grow flowers in it, and that it changes through the year, and is attractive to insects.  Besides the bees and butterflies, our long grass has been lively with assorted grasshoppers (or are they crickets?) since late summer.  I like the fact that it reduces mowing, which apart from the effort involved, and the cost of petrol, is a disproportionately polluting activity, due to petrol lawnmower engines being pro rata far less clean or efficient than modern cars.  Really, what's not to like?

Long grass needs the contrast with short grass, partly to provide access around the garden, but also to make it clear that the long grass has been left that way on purpose as a design feature, rather than because you couldn't afford a gardener, or to have the lawnmower repaired.  In larger and fancier gardens than ours I have even seen designs with three different cutting heights, which worked very well, a strip of manicured short turf alongside the gravelled paths, then a strip of medium height grass, before the great expanse of uncut grass waving in naturalistic glory.

The clue to the daffodil lawn is in the name.  It has daffodils planted in it, so we couldn't cut it until June anyway to give the foliage time to die back.  Once you've waited until June, you might as well leave it until September.  After the daffodils come ox eye daisies.  I tried to persuade Silene vulgaris, or bladder campion, to grow there, but it disliked competition with the grass and far preferred to seed itself in the cracks between the paving and in the gravel.  Knautia arvensis, or field scabious, has been a little shy as well, but some opportunistic cow parsley is starting to sneak in at one end.  Primroses in the bank that runs down from the daffodil lawn to the main top lawn seemed like a good idea, but in practice the bank is too dry for them, and populated by mice (or are they voles?) which eat the petals.

The Systems Administrator scrantled* the level area of the lawn, and I am now tackling the bank with shears, as well as tidying up the straggling patches of lodged grass and odd rogue tufts which escaped the power scythe.  At the same time I'm having a good go at the back of the Eleagnus hedge, which has ballooned out over the lawn during the summer.  Tracks trodden across long grass look absolutely dreadful, so it does create management issues having it running alongside the hedge, but there isn't room for a path, the daffodil lawn being a fairly modest triangle bounded by the patio (or terrace), the hedge, and the main lawn.

The bottom lawn is a bigger beast, and it took several passes with the power scythe, while I raked like mad and helped heap the cut grass into the trailer.  Getting rid of the debris is always tricky, since it is chock full of weed seeds and quite unfit to go on the compost heap.  This year, because of the hot weather, we haven't had a bonfire for months, and the pile of woody prunings to burn has grown so vast that the mown grass can probably go in with them without the bonfire slowing to a smoking, mouldering heap.  The SA tries to avoid the creatures that appear during cutting, mice and toads rudely disturbed in their previously peaceful mini-meadow, and trying desperately to escape.  We didn't see many toads today, and haven't all year, which is a worry.  Last year there were loads.  Apart from the fact that I like toads, I regard amphibians as being good indicators of the health of the ecosystem, like the canary in the coal mine.  Plenty of toads and newts = healthy garden, fewer = warning sign.  Of something out of kilter, less healthy.

Come the spring the bottom lawn will be studded with the purple and mauve flowers of Crocus tommasinianus, still not enough.  Each year I plant another couple of bags of bulbs, and fret that I was too mean, and should have bought many more.  After the crocus come the fritillaries and cowslips, though it is really too dry for them, and they grow taller and fatter in the borders, where they don't have to compete with the grass.  I tried sowing yellow rattle** seed last year, freshly gathered from the garden at work (with the boss's permission), but I don't think it took.  Camassia quamash largely failed to go, for all that I read it was good for naturalising in grass.  I have seen a website offering yellow rattle plugs, and am wondering if those would be a good investment, come next spring.

*The English language has no verb for the act of cutting down long grass with a walk-behind petrol driven power scythe, and so we gleefully adopted Stella Gibbon's splendidly descriptive but undefined agricultural term.  Though I don't think I could get the SA to scrantle two acres.  The long grass in the meadow had to wait until Friday because the vibrations were making the SA's torso ache too badly.

**Semi-parasite that lives on grass, usefully (from the gardener's point of view) weakening it.  The SA's brother spent a lot of money on yellow rattle seed for their small meadow, to no avail.  It is not easy to establish.