Lawn wars | Jack Marshall's column

The box was weighty and bandaged up with reams of tape as if it’d been packed by an adhesive mummy. After a series of deranged-knife-murderer stabs with a pair of kitchen scissors, the item finally appeared.

Scotts Miracle-Gro EverGreen Complete Lawn Food, Weed and Moss Killer Spreader.

Some context. As you’ll have no doubt noticed, before taking a recent turn, the weather has been pretty good in spells this summer. As you’ll have also no doubt have noticed, most of us are spending a lot more time at home these days thanks to The Virus Which Shall Not Be Named. Put those two things together and you get one thing: lawn wars.

Five neighbouring lawns are visible from my bedroom window and the whole gamut of efforts is on show.

Directly opposite is a row of three gardens: a veritable Goldilocks’ buffet. From left to right, the first is the botanical version of lockdown hair: lazy and overgrown. There are yellow buttercups everywhere and some of the more ambitious foliage is visibly making a break for it, climbing halfway up the fence in a last-ditch bid to escape the Wild West of gardens.

The middle lawn is middling. Appropriate. Let’s move on.

The third lawn is the polar opposite to the first. Also like lockdown hair, it has been cut aggressively short by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. The owner used a grass strimmer to do the whole thing, carving it back to the bone and leaving the cuttings to dry up in the sun. Now it just looks faintly like hay.

The crux of the lawn war is in the gardens directly to the left and right of mine. They’re stunning. They’re the kind of lawns every lawn parent would want their lawn-offspring to bring home. Lush and healthy, they’re not too long but they’re also thick enough to sway gently in the breeze. The grass actually looks comfy. How they hell have they managed that?

Each boasts a garden box suggesting use of all kinds of elaborate machinery to keep it prim and proper. The one to the left has a little gazebo, while the one to the right has a couple of comfy chairs and fairy lights. Both appear to have invented a new shade of green just to wind me up.

Hence the Miracle-Gro. This war is not over. My own lawn may be bumpy and a little patchy from where the cheap mower chews up the turf. It may be pale and weedy. But the secret weapon has arrived. And now we wait.