An ode to grass

It turns out grass can be rather intense pink

Every year in my quant English village a large agricultural show full of cows and extremely fluffy bunnies and the like is held.  In preparation for this the council comes round a few weeks beforehand and cuts the grass on all the verges that don't 'belong' to a house to make the place all neat and tidy ready for the hoards of people who pass through for the show.  Only this year something seemed to go seriously awry and the mowers never came.  The grass got longer and longer and began looking really untidy.  But as when growing anything such as your hair or a beard for example, there is a really ugly stage you have to get through and then suddenly it comes into its own. 

Look at all that variety: the shades of purple! The textures and structure! And the overwhelming birds nest mess effect.  How I appreciate a bit of chaos

One day I got out of my car and was amazed at the amount of colour and variety of flower there was in what had before resembled just scrubby green grass.  Obviously the overwhelming colour of the verge was still green but it had a real purple and red hue running right through it.  For the first time ever I finally appreciated the joy of wild meadow-type planting.  The flowers were not big and showy but the mix of structures and the sheer number of them all intermingled just had a beauty all of their own.

Also a significant amount of red in patches, the varying colours stuck to particular drifts.  Why it has photographed orange tinged and almost pink in two different pictures I don't know

I couldn’t resist whipping out my camera and taking a few pictures, although I did wait until a time when as many of my neighbours were out as possible because if people see you randomly squatting in a verge of grass taking pictures they will naturally assume that you have gone nuts.  To get a nice angle I had to get real down and dirty getting right in that grass with it, which is fine, I have very little dignity to lose these days.  The real problem was I have hayfever, I have hayfever bad and my pollen of choice is from grass.  By the time I had finished taking my few snaps I was sneezing approximately every 20 seconds continuously, and the nose was seriously a-running. 

The verge remained long and luscious and beautiful for a week or two, and then one day I got home from work, and it was gone.  The mowers had come and we were just left with hay.  I wish they had left it, but maybe its' real beauty lay in the fact that it wasn't meant to be there and it was never going to last.  It has made me wonder, why do grass verges have to be kept short and green and boring?  Why not leave them to turn into little wild stretches that break the formality of our neighbourhoods and bring a little excitement to a tired eye on the return home.  Yes, I doubt dog walkers would be pleased but if anything that is a bonus in my book.  One lasting effect it has had on me is a wish to incorporate grass into my actual garden hence the purchasing of bunny tails at Hampton.  They remind me of open fields and are terribly tactile, long and yielding to a hand and that is good enough; not everything must produce flowers to be worthy of a place.

And then it was gone and we had a mini hay field blowing debris down the street
I think they should have left it...