Probably the greatest burden our current garden has imposed upon me has been that of keeping the lawn mowed. I'm not aiming for anything manicured—just a height that won't tickle my shins or raise my neighbors’ eyebrows. But our half-acre property has an authentic Ozarks slope, abundant rocks and divots, several retaining walls, numerous tight corners, and shrubs to trim around almost everywhere. Moreover, I have three small children, none of whom is old enough to be trusted near a mower, still less pressed into service as a homegrown lawn service.
Maybe all that is enough to explain why I now maintain our lawn primarily with a scythe, and maybe it isn't. The scythe certainly makes the work of lugging my mowing implement all over our hill lighter; the tool fits more readily into our many odd corners and lets me trim around tiny shrubs with less risk of whacking them down. I do find it a more family-friendly tool as well, as I can stop the blade instantly, and there's no risk of kicking up rocks or debris.
Mainly, though, I'm mowing with a scythe now because I loathed operating a lawnmower and a string trimmer—there was almost not a single moment of their use I was not wishing to be doing something else—whereas mowing with a scythe I find mildly pleasurable at worst. Though an hour's worth of scything yesterday left my lower back screaming today, with some stretches and some ibuprofen I look forward to starting on the yard again soon.
In large part this pleasure derives from the skill involved: cutting grass with a scythe takes technique, practice, study, physical and intellectual discipline. A scythe poorly used won't cut a thing; to mow with this tool, I had to learn to hold my body in a certain way and to adjust the tool to my physicality. I'm still learning the nuances of producing an efficient stroke, of mowing on uneven ground, and of maintaining the tool with whetstone and anvil. A lawnmower, by contrast, requires little of the user, making its operation tedious in the extreme. Mowing with the scythe makes me a student of the tool and the task. For some people, that might be a drawback—too much fuss and bother. For me, it's the only thing that makes the mowing tolerable.
Garden training, like education more generally, can tend to stress information over skill development, teaching lists of plant types or the components of the soil over how to perform complex manual tasks. But complex skills like grafting, pruning, and plant propagation open up garden possibilities that knowledge alone won't give you.
I'm can't claim a high degree of skill at any of these tasks, but I am working on it. Besides scything, Rachel and I have rung in the spring in a flurry of plant propagation. Our nursery area is packed with cuttings and divisions; with profuse plants like yarrow and Egyptian walking onions, we've been reduced to hunting for people to take our extras. At the same time, I am watching our young fruit trees come into bearing with good structure, validating my still-developing pruning abilities. I haven't managed to do any grafting yet—an apple tree I planned to overgraft last year, a big-box specimen left by previous homeowners, perished—but I'm practicing my grafting cuts on prunings and biding my time.
Whether as complex as grafting or as simple as how to start a seed, garden skills are satisfying because they involve the mind and body alike in a complex interaction with another living being. You must understand the vegetative response of a tree to different types of cuts, the conditions under which grass is most full of water, the temperature preferences of a seed. You must judge the current state of the being before you, drawing on your senses as well as your knowledge. You must know how to use your body, your sense of balance or the weight of your thumb, as well as the relevant tool. To prune a tree or to use a scythe is to reconnect mind, body, and world, self and other. It might be one of the only moments of such integration permitted by our ruthlessly segmenting modern world.
Like my garden education, my liberal arts education, invaluable as it was, did not teach me to do very much. Learning to think critically can have the effect of making even the skills one does have harder to practice. At its best, the awareness of history and complexity provided by a liberal arts education provides self-awareness and a check on rash action; but all that reflection can also be paralyzing. As grateful as I am for the perspective provided by the education I spent the entirety of my twenties pursuing, I'm equally grateful for the skills I am developing now, skills that possess a holism that my education, for all its virtues, never attained.
The sun is coming up and we had rain last night; the air is cool and the grass stands alert and moist. It will be a good morning to scythe another section of the lawn. My lower back has warned me to go gently, but my sense of the weather and the plants is telling me that it is a good time to get back out and do things in the garden.
Learning to Do Things in the Garden
I was hoping this would include some tricks for lower back pain (mine aches) but this reflection was better. Been thinking a lot lately about my relative skillless-ness apart from a keyboard.