Lawn Mowing Quotes

“The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot.

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.

Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

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“So far as I am concerned the difference between men and women is that men are interested in cutting grass and women are not. I actually prefer a daisy-sprinkled lawn; Jack, of course, wanted meticulous stripes.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“You’re just an overdressed galah who can’t stop spreading flowers everywhere he goes. One day you’re gunna run into a bloke with a mower and you won’t know what hit you.”
― W.R. Gingell, Between Family

“Αποτελούμε αναγκαστικά μυστήριο για τον εαυτό μας, και κάθε ιδέα ότι μπορούμε να γίνουμε πλήρως ενιαίοι, μια για πάντα, είναι μια φαντασίωση που μοιάζει με το αστικό ιδεώδες του τέλεια περιποιημένου γκαζόν.”
― Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know