edging the lawns

I am working my way around the edges of the lawn in the back garden.  The upper and lower lawns are connected by a sloping grass path, which it took me months to lay reusing turf lifted from the areas that became the rose beds, so there is only one gigantic, sinuous edge.  Although the basic layout of the back garden was determined before I took my single design module at horticultural college, I'd already grasped enough to know that edges make work.  When I started on the garden I was still commuting to London, and work on the garden was a luxury.  Lots of fiddly small beds with their individual little edges was never going to be an option.

I'm not just cutting the grass, but trying to sweeten the curves with a half moon lawn edger.  When we first made the rose beds the edges were cut in perfect serpentine curves, but over time the lawn has tended to creep and you can see the wobbles and bulges.  If I were drawing the plan of the beds as they are supposed to be I could buy a flexible ruler and bend it into the smooth curves that I wanted, but alas, on the ground I have no giant ruler to follow, and it's a matter of trimming the grass with the shears so that I can see the existing line of the edge, then taking the merest sliver off the lawn where the edge is in the right place, just to sharpen it, and cutting the excess away where it's crept over the border.

Of course when you are standing right over it with the lawn edger you can't see how it looks, so you have to take an inch or two off the worst lumps, then step back to view it properly, shave another inch off where it still looks uneven, and so on.  It's a bit like cutting topiary, in that if you take too much off you can't put it back, or at least not easily.  I know in theory how I'd do it if I had to.  The way to patch a lawn edge is to cut a square out of the lawn where the edge is damaged, reverse the square so that the clean edge faces the border and the damaged edge is within the body of the lawn, then brush earth into any gaps between the broken edge of the square and the rest of the lawn.  That's the theory, but it sounds quite a palaver.

As to what makes a sweet curve, you know it when you see it.  Of course a design based on straight lines would be easier to maintain, and one based on straight lines or circles easier to set out at the building stage.  There was a fashion in the 1990s for circular lawns, which are very easy to set out because you bang a peg in the centre and then run round with a string and a can of market paint. They seem to have gone out of favour now, along with armillary spheres and those stone balls that were all over the garden magazines about fifteen years ago.  And blue paint, though Titchmarsh blue never penetrated the upper echelons of garden taste.  Now straight lines are in, with box cubes, razor sharp edged paving slabs, and rectangular tanks of water.  Alas for all those people who have spent all that money on having their gardens professionally designed and made over in the prevailing post-modernist style.  I guarantee that in twenty years' time their outdoor living space will be as dated as an avocado bathroom suite.

Getting back to the lawn, edges matter.  Professional gardeners will tell you that if you've only got time to do one thing to tidy the garden, mow the lawn, and if you don't have time to do that, cut the edges.  I am not good at following this advice, finding the lawn less interesting than most of the other plants in the garden, but it's true, and I thought that before I started messing around with the borders I'd try and get the edges all tidy.  Sometimes as I struggle with my wobbly curves I fantasise about being able to fix them in their perfect shape for the next decade by fitting metal lawn edging strips.  There are proprietary systems on the market, one in particular advertising heavily in the garden magazines.  I know I won't, though.  The cost would be prohibitive, and even if I could afford it I wouldn't feel justified spending that amount on the garden, just I would never eat at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, because while I'm sure the food and ambience would be superb, no meal could be worth that much.