“Darl,” said my mother, eyeing my (admittedly slow-growing) ground cover, “why don’t you just lay down some Astroturf?”
I stared at her in total disbelief? Astroturf? The fake grass lining the meeting rooms of hip digital agency boardrooms everywhere? The hockey pitch stuff? The entirely synthetic, plastic ever-green blades of GARDENING FAILURE?
“Why?” I asked with some consternation?
“Uhm…because it will look nice,” she replied.
“You don’t think my garden looks nice?” I asked.
Now she looked up at my dad with an ‘Oh dear. Where is this going?’ look and he jumped in to save her. “Babe, it’s just that this stuff is taking a while to grow and if you had Astroturf it could look good tomorrow.”
‘Right,” I frowned at him. “Yes, it would.”
And I got it. They were right. Astroturf would look amazing. Its luscious, weed-free, even tone would be gorgeous. Not only beautiful to look at, buteasy to maintain. Astroturf is really the most perfect articulation of the suburban dream.
I would never have to declare war on a snail, worry about the too much/ too little water drama that is Cape Town’s weather patterns and even better – no mowing.
But. And it’s a BIG but.
It’s not real. Astroturf looks great until you are standing on it and it pokes your bare feet or it gets so hot it might give you second degree burns. And it’s super slippery when it’s wet, and dog poo…you don’t even want to imagine what melted dog poo in Astroturf is like. Grim.
We need to remember what my garden is all about. It’s about my journey into learning about taking care of myself, by myself. My garden is not about looking good. It’s about growing stuff and caring for plants and forgetting that I had bulbs in a pot and then suddenly seeing them bloom like magic.
It’s about taking my kids out into our tiny front space and discussing which plants seem ‘happy’ and which might be ‘happier’ somewhere else.
I feel like a knight when I pick up a snail and toss it over the wall, away from my plants-in-distress. I like watering them and I even like the slightly guilty worry of watching one or two die…and the thinking about why they died and what I will do differently next time.
There is a cyclical thing happening in my garden and it’s not always pretty, but it’s real and it’s teaching me stuff, and I like that.
So ‘No.’ No Astroturf for me just yet. I want to keep my garden real and messy and slow. A bit like its gardener.
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