April – Bacon and Eggs

Illustration: Greg Stevenson
Words: Mathew Clayton

A few years ago i moved from London to Sussex, swopping a tiny patch of grass for a third of an acre of wild greenery. I was keen my children enjoy their new freedom and so, like many men before, i set about taming the lawn.

I didn’t have any spare cash for a fancy lawnmower so i looked on Freecycle. The first one i acquired died silently after an hour, the second one lasted an afternoon before it went out with a spectacular bang and a puff of smoke. They weren’t built to cope with rabbit holes and anthills. I turned next to my grandad’s sycthe which was hanging on the wall in a shed, untouched for the twenty five years since his death. There is a certain romance to scything that attracted me, and standing under the apple tree swinging it back and forth i did indeed feel like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel. I soon discovered it was great for laying waste to the nettles along the drive, but crap at actually cutting grass. Shamefully, it was not long before i broke it. I hung it back up on the wall and hoped no-one would notice for another twenty five years. Finally, i tried my parents old 1950s manual lawnmover. It made a wonderful mechanical whirring noise when in full flight but i could only push it about ten feet before i needed a sit down.

The combination of all these efforts meant the lawn was finally looking okay, but i was a broken man. I vowed to just let the grass grow. The grass grew and something rather wonderful and unexpected also happened. Giant swirls of little yellow flowers appeared, hundreds and thousands of them. They were Lotus corniculatus, more commonly known as ‘bacon and eggs’ (they often have a red streak which is the bacon). The plant is a member of the pea family, and has flowers that are small oblong pods shaped like broad beans – similar looking to the flowers of the gorse bush. They are also known, due to the shape of the dried up seed pod, Bird’s Foot Trefoil. You will see them growing in patches of grass all through the summer.

The garden was now nettle and thistle free and so more child friendly, but the bacon and eggs brought with them a new hazard – thousands of bees all nestling just out of sight in the grass. I didn’t push the mower over the flowers – they looked just too good to cut down. Instead every time I watched one of my kids run barefoot through them I just winced slightly. They didn’t get stung. Okay they did, but it was only once and soon forgotten.

Words: Mathew Clayton
Illustration: Greg Stevenson
http://www.greg-stevenson.co.uk/