Lawns

  Englishmen certainly love their lawns. Each small fenced in green swath throughout the English countryside seems to be a statement to the world by the owner that he belongs. Quite what to is less certain.
  When an Englishman buys or builds a house in the UK, his first job is not to see where his kids will go to school or to buy new bedroom furniture. No, he plants a lawn. He then nurtures it through rain, wind and frost until it reaches its full verdant fruition. Then, and only then, he is ready to show it to the world. So, he tells his wife to invite relatives, friends and neighbors on Sunday afternoon to come and drink tea and see the lawn. Imagine the feelings of the invited, waiting anxiously for the weekend so they can come and drink tea and watch the grass grow. Unbearable exhilaration.
  My parents had a nice lawn at the back of the house. They called it the tennis court despite the fact that, in the sixty years leading up to the last time I was at that house, not a single ball had been hit over the net. The probable  reason was that they had never put a net on it. However, for many years, all the uncles ,aunts, grandparents, cousins, etc used to play endless needle matches of croquet on this lawn. These often went on until after dark.
  My mother did not invite people to drink tea and see the lawn.You see, my father did not lay the lawn himself, so the lawn did not count.  My mother did invite people to tea on Sundays. But, this was to drink tea and eat raspberries and cream. You could sit on the lawn to drink your tea and eat your raspberries, but you were not supposed to actually look at the grass because, as I say, it didn't count.
  As a slight digression, mother went out of her way to supply the neighborhood with raspberries. As far as I can remember, she had planted more than twenty rows of them with about twenty plants in each row. So, this was something of an overkill. Raspberries have always been my very favorite fruit so, I was not about to complain.
She also had 600 show roses, complete overkill, but she won all kinds of ribbons and silver cups and even had a rose named after her.
  As a further digression, all of our garden was formally landscaped except for about a quarter acre in one corner which was covered in rough but nice grass with trees on it. It had been suggested that she plant some assorted species of daffodil in random circles all over the grass and cut the grass short between the circles. So, she marked out the circles and hand planted 3000 (yes, three Thousand) daffodils in them. The current owners of the house have made the landscaping in this area more formal including a new section of gravel driveway leading to a second entrance. But, they never could work out why all these bloody daffodils keep coming up, including in the driveway.
  Now, where was I? ...Oh, yes.....lawns.
  My Uncle Arthur had a really beautiful lawn. Shortly after World War 2, he built a wonderful house on 2 or 3 acres of land and he put virtually the whole area down to grass with flower beds and shrubs around the perimeter. So, he had about 2 acres of the most beautiful, completely flat lawn. Next to him on the east side,the neighbor had built a similar size house and also surrounded it with a beautiful, level lawn. A few years later the guy  who bought the land on the other side also built a fabulous house and surrounded it with an incredible lawn and perfectly manicured shrubbery. This latter gentleman was indeed proud of his verdant creation.
  About the worst enemy to any Englishmen is the mole. This is a small animal, about the size of a mouse and covered in a shiny black fur coat and it's almost completely blind. They live by eating earthworms and they live underground. If  you see a mole above ground,  he will not run away presumably because he can't see where to run. So, he just hunkers down till the danger passes. Of course, he doesn't have to hunker very far as his legs are only about half an inch long. Underground, they dig tunnels very fast and, every few feet, they push the excavated dirt upwards through the surface to form a mound about 12 inches in diameter and 6  to 8 inches tall. A row of these molehills can thus ruin the look of an Englishman's  gem.
  Uncle Arthur  had moles in his lawn and he got rid of them in the usual way. That is, he bought some calcium carbide, sometimes called Miner's Lamp, dropped a few crystals down the hole under the molehill, followed by a cup of water, and then trod some dirt in the hole. The acetylene gas released by the crystals then wafted through the tunnels and killed all the mole colony. Easy!
  The lawn of the gentleman next door also was attacked by moles.  The calcium carbide method was not satisfactory to him for some reason. He bought 5 gallons of kerosene, put a funnel in the nearest molehill, and poured all the kerosene down the hole. About 20 minutes later, he was dissatisfied  with the lack of activity, although we do not know what he had expected to happen. So, he lit a match and threw it in the funnel, whereupon there was the most horrendous explosion and it seemed like the whole 2 acre green carpet took to the air. It rained dirt for hundreds of yards around. When the dust settled, what had been his lawn was now criss-crossed with a latticework of little trenches about 3 inches wide and 6 inches deep. He was not pleased! To add insult to injury, he didn't even have the dirt to fill in the trenches. He had donated that to the neighborhood.
  Apparently, it took Uncle Arthur hours to stop laughing!
  By the way, I forgot to tell you, the English tend to name their houses rather than give them numbers. Uncle Arthur named his.....You've got it!..."The Lawns".
  So, now you have a little background on Englishmen and their lawns. Personally, I am not really into lawns. Hedges are more fun.