Army Worms

It was an unseasonably cold and wet autumn when Katie first noticed the brown patches of grass.

Summer had come, baked the earth dry and gone all at once with none of the cool but still dry days they used to love about the fall. It was like winter had moved right in - intermittent rain and unusual humidity making it hard to know how to dress in the morning.

I love the fall. So does Mike. And when, especially if you’re a cyclist, it’s hard to know how to dress in the morning it can feel like more of a chore than a joy to leave the house at all. When the weather is hot and dry or cold and wet they each bring their own set of challenges and opportunities, but these are often predictable. When the weather is unpredictable, so is life.

Now, Mike isn’t a cyclist in the way you probably think of cyclists. He doesn’t wear spandex or ride his bike for no reason - though he does love riding it. It’s the kind of thing where you look forward to a longer commute, when the weather is good and the path better - it can be a joy to just be out there on a bike. But these days he hasn’t been riding just for the sake of it, which is okay, I just didn’t want you thinking he was the kind of sadist who zip around town like the amateur Tour de France. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either, it’s just that Mike isn’t making time for it these days and he doesn’t miss it, either.

Katie used to love the fall as well. The predictable weather and the opportunity to set the garden up for winter were such a relief after the busy summers in Perth. It was like a seasonal slow down, when you could start to reap the benefits of all that sunshine and care for the green things outside your door. It takes a lot to look after a lush, green style garden in a place like Perth. You’ve got to pay attention. To the sun, always, and to the water, the bugs and at the end of the season what has survived has often grown so large and lush that you need to trim it way back in order to give it a direction to grow in next year.

Lawns in particular are difficult to cultivate. Bouteloua dactyloides - buffalo grass - isn’t native to Perth or any other part of Australia. It needs a lot of water and relatively a lot of shade compared to the plants which evolved in the area. Unfortunately for gardeners of the western world, and maybe for all of us, buffalo grass also makes one hell of a lawn. And people love lawns.

It wasn’t always this way. There’s nothing inherently beautiful about anything really - we just get used to seeing things that way because of our moment in history. We look at a green, lush, regular patch of lawn and see beauty because of our culture; English culture. So maybe not all of our culture.

For the English landowners, once upon a time, it used to be that you’d keep fields for grazing animals and small patches for vegetarians. A lawn, or a field if you like, was a sort of technology for changing grass, which as a reminder is totally useless to humans as it is, into meat on animals that can digest it.

So a large, manicured field meant that not only did you have the money for land and you could afford to keep it that way for the animals you also owned but that you also had enough money to keep it that way for no one except yourself. The fields animals graze on are only really distant cousins to lush lawns you might play tennis or golf on, so a lawn that beautiful was more of a flex than anything. So naturally, we’ve learned to want them.

It might surprise you, or not - now - to learn that in the western world we’ve planted more land with buffalo grass than any other plant - more than all food crops combined. Imagine that for a moment. If you care for a lawn, you know how much water, pesticides, mowing - in short, how much love - go into even a patch of grass. On second thought, maybe don’t imagine it.

Mike certainly had imagined it.

‘Maybe we should plant a food garden, a food forrest, and native plants in spaces where that wouldn’t work. Just imagine the food security we could all achieve if landscaping were spilt even half into market gardens, like people used to do during the war. Then maybe we’d all get to trading the things which we each grew well with one another and maybe we’d all have better access to delicious, healthy food just like that.’

These are all great ‘maybes’, but maybe doesn’t cut it when you’re not a green thumb so much as a hippy. And with enough water, fertile ground and care just about anything will grow in Perth. And true, the kids can’t roll around as nicely on a veggie patch or meadow of natives as they can on a lawn. So many of us have at least a small lawn. It’s an aesthetic choice that’s hard to justify but more often than not, it just flies right under the radar. It’s not expensive enough to be really debilitating and not noticeable enough to get excited about, one way or another.

It’s like owning a car. On some level you know it’s expensive. You know you could probably put that money to better use. But who doesn’t want some nice things and in a city like Perth you just about need a car, even if taxis, public transport and let’s not forget bicycles are better in so many ways.

So you have a lawn, if you can. And if you’re going to have a lawn, you want it to be a lush, green lawn and not a patchy, yellow one. And getting your yellow lawn, I mean your green lawn, through summer in Perth is no easy feat. It takes time and expertise which just aren’t as common as they used to be. Sure we have the internet and Bunnings now, which maybe make things easier in one sense. But I would argue that while some things are just as possible as they once were - sourdough baking, clothes making, etc. they’re just a little incompatible with the modern pace of even a relaxed life.

But Katie managed to make it work, she was out there in the yard most days keeping an eye on things and trying to get one patch or another to grow. And by the end of the summer the lawn still was green, maybe yellow or patchy in a few places but certainly you’d call it a green lawn.

Then came the brown patches.

'It’s army worms!’ said her mother, ‘they’re moving over from the east and taking all our jobs.’

Neither Katie nor Mike had ever heard of an army worm before. Turns out they don’t look much like worms, more little caterpillars or the mealworms you might buy for pet food or keep as a pet science project if you’re in primary school.

‘The way to check for them’ Katie’s mother continued ‘is to dump a whole lot of soapy water on the lawn. They hate that, they’ll pop right up.’

As it turns out, army worms do hate it when you pour soapy water on the lawn. They do pop right out of the ground, in a surprising volume. And you know who loves it when you pour soapy water on the lawn? Dogs. Dogs and four year olds.

So Katie and Mike stood there on the lawn watching Taco and Matilda roll around in the suds and the army worms, wondering what they were going to do about it.

Soapy water on the lawn maybe isn’t the most desirable thing but surely it’s okay if you’re using some kind of nice, vegan soap? Sure it is. But it does raise the question of how you get the army worms to leave if you’re trying to keep the garden a clean, organic, pesticide-free type of place.

If any of you are gardeners this might be a familiar learning curve.

I think most gardeners must start out with visions of a beautiful ecosystem, of the natural world at perfect harmony. Plants, fungi, mycelium, insects, birds, the occasional small mammal - nothing to worry about in Perth since there aren’t any raccoons, squirrels or skunks anywhere on the island of Australia. Maybe you picture yourself tending to this nursery of naturalia, a sort of modern day Disney princess singing to the life around you. Mike always liked to think of Katie this way. The Constant Gardener, he called her.

But sooner or later the shine comes off the apple, sometimes literally. By that I mean you come up against a problem that isn’t cooperating with your view of nature, some pest that just won’t be easily managed in an organic, permaculture approved sort of way. Maybe some folks could manage it, maybe not. It seems to me that if you’ve got a day job and kids and a dog and friends and family it might just be one too many things to try and run a yard sized hobby farm.

So when the chilli oil and orange oil and coffee grounds and eggshells and organic fertilizer and strategic planting all fail you, and you’re faced with the prospect of a deteriorating garden rather than a bohemian one, what’s a constant gardener to do? What you do is you declare war.

You go to Bunnings. You get something in a can. It’s probably a red can, with all sorts of warnings on the label. Maybe you’re a bit ashamed to bring it to the cash so you do the self checkout, like buying condoms or frozen party pies - you don’t want some teenage cashier to see you and judge you.

So you get home and try that, thinking at least this, this is just one indiscretion. This might be just a one time thing. We all make mistakes and you’ll get right back on track as soon as this problem is solved. The can promises results in just one application. So you can spray or weed or what have you and go to bed that night thinking maybe, just maybe, things will look better in the morning. What could go wrong?

Well a week later, staring at the still brown patch of grass that no longer felt right to call a lawn, Katie had to admit she needed another approach. She wanted something you would describe as chemicals, maybe something they didn’t have at Bunnings. The rules were different about these kinds of things in different countries, weren’t they? Surely in parts of Asia they’re still using DDT?

But no, not yet, that feels like too much, maybe. So you try again. They used twice as much of the organic stuff and maybe a bit of the red can here and there. The lawn wasn’t perfect, hardly a victory over nature. Maybe you’d call it a defeat. Maybe you could consider planting natives or a rock garden. But it was good enough. The kids still played and the dog still rolled around and there was a certain magic ecosystem to it, even the lawn had its own seasonality and character. After the rain, toadstools would pop up. In the spring you could see the runners shooting out from the main patches, fighting as all life does for a foothold.

Lawns aren’t perfect. They are however, better than asphalt. The plants might not grab as much carbon as a forest but they do grab more than planters. Buffalo grass is actually one of the more eco-friendly lawn choices. It requires very little water compared to other grasses, rarely needs fertilizer, and its deep root systems store carbon. The natural lateral growth via runners means less intervention and a lower environmental footprint than most turf grasses. And when it does need some intervention, one more person spending time in the garden is one more person communicating with nature, in their own way.

Maybe you do learn something from this after all - it isn’t always easy or fun but you keep trying. Because somewhere between the struggle and the results is where the real beauty is. Between the messy trying and the fleeting achievements are the beautiful moments of a garden, and a life, well tended.