05/20/01

Lawn boy confesses

God’s gotta have a sense of humor. But is he laughing with me, or at me? Let me explain: I am not now, nor have I ever been, one of those suburbanguys who frets more over his lawn than over his children. Rather, I have one guiding principle: “Green is keen.”

Meaning, of course, that I’m not at all fussy over what populates my yard, as long as it is the same color as grass. If it’s green, I’ll mow it and get on with my life. That goes for clover (it’s green); violets (green when the little purple flowers are shorn off), even dandelions (until they turn yellow or white).

One green plant, however, is not welcome: quack grass. And that’s only because it grows faster than the rest of the lawn. Makes me have to mow too often.

But back to God. And his laughter.

Once or twice a spring I suffer through an extended journey to the local garden store so my wife can find work for me. It involves putting plants in flower boxes and rearranging perennials in a rock garden like they were pieces of furniture in a living room: “Maybe they’d look better here. Or over there. Or there. …” (Actually I liked them best when they were still at the garden store.)

It was during one of those garden-store visits that my wife was attracted to a display of ornamental plants. She dragged me over and crooned: “Wouldn’t this look good in the garden?”

I looked closely, carefully calculating the amount of work involved in digging a hole for the plant, when it struck me: This isn’t an ornamental plant, IT’S QUACK GRASS!

Yes, it had a fancy plant name, something like “blue fountain grass,” conceived in the mind of a guerilla grass marketer, no doubt. (Though, I suppose, no different than calling stuff in your salad “field greens.”) But when it comes to quack grass, I take seriously the command in Genesis that humans have “dominion over animals and plants.” So we settled on some other plant … I was not going to go through that again.

In the meantime, I hope God got a laugh out of this. I’m certain some landscape-marketing firm did. All the way to the bank.

Tom Sheridan
Editor and General Manager

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