Turf love...
In my regular 9-5 pursuit of publishing books, one of the titles I’ve worked on was Houston Then and Now. Houston, on the Buffalo Bayou, became centre of world attention this year when Hurricane Harvey dumped about a year’s worth of rain in an afternoon and all the U.S. network news crews rushed there to gorge themselves on tragedy footage.
Summers in Houston have always been pretty fierce and playing the national game of baseball was particularly problematic in all the heat and humidity. To avoid the stifling heat the team’s owner decided to create world’s biggest indoor arena, where temperature could be controlled. And so the “Eighth Wonder of the World” was developed, the Houston Astrodome, which was opened in 1965 to great fanfare. The only problem with the multi-million dollar stadium, and it was a big one, the grass shipped in for the playing surface died.
What to do?
They had a multi-million dollar stadium and no playing surface. And so they developed artificial grass for the Astrodome, which they duly named AstroTurf and the Houston Astros baseball team started their long tenure, with a few more fiction burns than they might otherwise have been expecting.
Well, fast forward to 2017 and our newly bought Victorian house, while being perfect in so many ways had one un-Victorian feature that we weren’t too sure about. The rear lawn was not a mixture of tough-wearing rye grasses and fescues, it was spookily green. It was AstroTurf. No matter, it was nice and flat and within a month of arrival in July it would be duly replaced by the stuff that grows.
However, just like a David Attenborough-narrated nature film; then something extraordinary happened. We started to accept it. From a rear garden of 160-feet, most of which was grass, we had taken on a bit of lifeless, green-coloured plastic that no animals were willing to dig up. And we were still getting a good night’s sleep.
And do you know what. On the balance sheet of pros and cons, there are many good things to be said about having an AstoTurf lawn.
You don’t have to cut it, or invent a series of excuses as to why you haven’t got round to cutting it.
No petrol has to be bought for the mower and there are no servicing bills for the mower which make you wonder if you've just been charged the same as having a new engine in a Ferrari Testarossa.
Your daughter can’t take the p*** out of you for not maintaining precise parallel stripes, which your father-in-law effortlessly managed beyond the age of 80
There are no grass clippings to gum up the compost heap.
Thames Water’s reservoirs remain that much fuller. You don’t have to get the sprinkler out in summer if you have a week of hot sun. “Hey, hosepipe ban, bring it on!”
When you kneel on it you don’t get grass stains.
It’s a very good surface for ball games, offering an equally consistent bounce for footballs, tennis balls and small children.
It’s mole proof.
There’s no need to feel guilty that the aerator you bought is hardly ever used.
You can walk on it when it’s frosty without suddenly going, ‘oh no, I shouldn’t be walking on the lawn when it’s frosty’.
It has to be admitted there are a few negative aspects. Garden designers rattle on about how they want to make the garden like a room, like an extension of the house, and this certainly fits that model – it’s like you’ve dragged a cheap carpet outside.
It’s normally bereft of any kind of wildlife activity.
Whereas before we would get blackbirds, crows, magpies, jays, robins, woodpeckers, squirrels and foxes digging up the turf, along with visiting bluetits, parakeets, goldfinch and wrens, now we just have a solitary pigeon. But at least the fungal world hasn’t given up on us. The other day we were thrilled to see some fungi on our big green mat. As you can tell from the photo we’ve managed to host a lovely crop of Agaricus plastisporus. Not quite enough for a mushroom omelette I grant you, but it’s a start.
