Forest Gardening meets Deep and Personal Ecology

"I'm going to get rid of all that grass!"

It took me days to see that I had sucumbed to the very thing I had thought to end. Not doing is still doing and I was not doing big time. I did not like grass at Harmony Forest.

Cities get rid of forest and hold it back from the unseen edges of their lives with grass and concrete. These two favourites define boundaries over which cityfolk definitely do not cross, except on get-fit ocassions and pecial holidays.

Succoured into the control that is normally expected of a concrete human I was worshiping it backwards. I was eliminating grass to allow forest to merge with the people.

Grass had become the symbol of what I feared most, the city, and I was out to destroy it. I was no less a grass control freak than those who ritualistically mowed their lawns to a fine patina weekly.

Domesticated grasses make acceptable company to those whose kerbs and lawnmowers spread their way into the remaining forests of the world and whose own seed increases the human population to unprecedented levels. Yet more humans, replace yet more native habitats with pervasive grass, as grains, and as feed source for the animals, that feed the gaping mouths of yet more humans ... and I wanted none of it.

The fortnightly requirement to apply lawnmower and line-trimmer to the pristine patina was not going to control me.

I was "pure". I was putting back bark and twig mulches. I was building cabins, gardens, paths, and driveways over grass. I was killing thousands and thousands of grass plants. In the city as a professional gardener I was ripping grass out and cutting it down from places it ought not to be. In other places I was mowing it down for customers who risked the disapproval of neighbours if they left it to grow too long.

It was fine for the seed of humans to disseminate widely for it is God's (not my God's) request that we go "forth and multiply" and have dominion over the grasses. The seed heads of long grass were not to make seed as humans do. They owed it to God. Humans and not grass were to dominate.

So how could I give grass itself a place in my living space?

Grass knows one key difference. Its habitat is not the entire world, it will not grow in the forest, and will not chop down and deny the forest its place in the world simply to give itself more space to dominate alone with its own seed-children.

I acknowledge its purpose, accept its place, and give it space.

I have kept my little lawn for now. I call it "Play".

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Love,

David


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