CRABGRASS ON THE
LAWN OF LIFE

By Robert Laurence

Here they come, a dray or so of chuck-chucking buck-toothed bushy-tails chomping on acorns al dente. They're rooting for nuts on the front forty. And they're not the worst of it. No wonder there were KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs posted in Eden; there's no splendor in the grass. You always lose. If squirrels don't get your lawn, moles and voles and maybe zilch bugs and Chaos chaos viruses will have a go at it. It's a sad sod story. Grass resists every blandishment. Fertilize it too little, it starves to death; increase the rate, it dies of gout. One way or another, the lawn keeper is always a loser, give or take a few jugs of dandelion wine.

Rain is a prime example. It's an immutable law of nature that El Nino strikes immediately after grass seed is planted and sweeps your newly sown seed to the lawn next door or makes a mead of the flower beds. This invariably happens, despite your prayers to the Aztec Xipe and all the other patron saints of gardeners - but it's nothing compared with the escalation on the horizon.

For fast on the heels of the spring rain comes your campaign against fungi and friends feeding on the pampered pampas. These minute marauders are programmed to waste your perfect lawn and more of them reside in a handful of soil than there are lawn rangers all over the land chugging into combat on ridem mowers. The lawnlord finds himself on hands and knees searching the savanna with a powerful magnifying glass trying to separate the harmful from the friendly bugs. He knows never to harm a soldier bug, which is brown with white speckles, but always to exterminate an army bug, which is white with brown speckles. Or have I got that backwards" It can get very confusing sometimes. For example, lawn scientists say several backstabbing bugs have bugs - and the bugs they tote around are beneficial. In any case, you often feel like you are the object of the most devastating invasion in horticultural history. By the time the life cycle leaves for greener pastures you have witnessed the survival of the fittest, which ain't your lawn - by now little more than pitted patches of pigweed and dandelion salad that makes the Sahara seem lush by comparison.

At times, however, defeat does not appear imminent. Suppose you start a new lawn from seed. By some miracle several morose blades might sprout on a plain as acned as adolescence, conquering fearsome chomping creatures Stephen King never dreamed of, at a cost of about ten bucks a square foot - yet if this happens, the scintilla of grass, each blighted blade of which you've come to affectionately call by name, is usually burnt to foggage by over fertilizing. And if we with the withering touch don't defoliate everything by blundering and groping, forget it. An optimistic neighbor of mine planted a new lawn a few years back. There he was feeling like Xipe in Xanadu. His lawn germinated, was fed real soul food that fall. He sat back smugly waiting for spring - when he found nothing but his gorge rising and dander coming up because he planted annual instead of perennial seed. He awoke that fine morning, glanced out the window, and swore for an instant that somebody had stolen his lawn.

Grass that does survive leads a life of luxury on this green planet; anyone reincarnated could do worse than come back as a blade of grass, upon which North Americans alone spend about 26 billion dollars a year. And unless you plan to employ an efficient lawn-cropping llama or cow, as l8th century British nobility did, you'll have to do all the work yourself. Such royal green carpet treatment includes filling in mole holes, mocking-up rope 'snakes" to fake out birds, breeding geese to do the weeding, even sneaking over and broadcasting squirrel mating calls from an unsuspecting neighbor's velvet veldt - all for a stand of green, a fool's paradise where Linnaeus himself would fear to tread.

The only way to grow a jolly good lawn, in the words of the head groundskeeper at Kings College, Oxford, is to "feed it and roll it, and feed it and roll it, and you do that for 300 years." I don't mean to hex anybody's chances, but I don't think most of us have got the genes for that. How about planting wheat or corn instead - right now more grass is grown nationally than either of these major crops. Or maybe we groundskeepers ought to lay down vineyards and wine cellars instead of a morass of grass. Maybe we should play the Sodfather and hire the Lucca Brazzi, Jr. Lawn Service, or donate all our lawns to the Turfgrass Museum in Pottsville, Pa. (Let young Lucca make them an offer they can't refuse!) Whatever. Anything. Surely there must be better things for people to do than crawl around watching the grass turn brown.

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