Motor mower sparks moral crisis
3rd October 2009


One of the final things my neighbour Leanne Argyle did before she joined the tide of kiwis flowing to the Gold Coast was to give me her late father’s motor mower. It is the first motor mower I have owned. Pause a moment, dear reader, and reflect upon the enormity of that statement. For a New Zealand male of 51 to admit he has never owned a motor mower is like Michael Laws claiming modesty.

It’s not that I have never owned a lawn: I have possessed lawns all my life, usually large ones. Since I was a child I have been an enthusiastic participant in that greatest of kiwi weekend rituals – taming, trimming and tidying a suburban lawn. The difference is that, until now, I have always used a hand mower - a ‘push’ mower as we called it.

Thirty or forty years ago a push mower was commonplace but I can think of nobody who uses one today. Why did I persist for so long? To answer that question is to invite a philosophical discussion, a dialectic of home gardening that would fill several large volumes.

Let me just say that my attachment to the push mower was partly about style (I liked the effect it had on a lawn) and partly about personal fitness (it’s cheaper than joining a gym). I’ll confess that as the years went by it also became a matter of pride, particularly after we moved to Carters Terrace and took up a half acre garden, much of it grass.

So to be confronted with Leanne’s late father’s motor mower was no small matter. Here was a gift with hooks. It sat in my driveway like a great red beetle, exhaling smells of petrol and silage. I circled it suspiciously, my soul in turmoil. What was I to do?

My instinctive reaction was to give it back, but by the time I discovered the gift it was too late, the Argyles had departed. There was nobody to give it back to. Clearly they had observed me pushing my hand mower across the vast acreage of my lawn and had left me this machine out of sympathy, or perhaps to provoke the moral dilemma I now confronted.

My second thought was simply to park the machine in the corner of the garage and continue using my push mower. And that is exactly what I did until the motor mower’s silent mockery became too much for me.

My reluctance to take up the motor mower sprang from more than a desire to cling to old habits. It went all the way back to Mrs McClymont.

As a child I flexed my entrepreneurial spirit by developing a small lawn-mowing business. On most days after school I cut lawns for the many elderly women of our neighbourhood. All my clients had push mowers except for Mrs McClymont, who insisted I used her motor mower. This was a leviathan, an untamable beast of the high veldt, an ancient reel mower with ape-hanger handle bars. It was a brute to start and, being self-propelled, when finally coaxed to life was almost impossible for a young boy to control. It dragged me around Mrs McClymont’s lawns in a cloud of blue smoke, occasionally rampaging through flowerbeds and rose bushes. My only effective way of bringing it to a halt was to aim for a tree or fence post.

This early experience with motor mowers was on my mind when I eventually decided to try out my new machine. True to expectation, Leanne’s late father’s mower proved to be as temperamental as Mrs McClymont’s. It was slow to start and quick to cut out. I tinkered and fiddled, cursed and complained and eventually carted the machine off to Skinner’s in Netherby.

Now, in the full flush of spring growth, I am slowly becoming accustomed to the motor mower. It is fast, effortless and convenient.

Do I feel happier, fulfilled, or at least more in tune with my fellow suburbanites? Perhaps, but I miss the satisfaction of working up a good sweat and I try to ignore the reproaches of my old push mower cast, after all these years, to the back of the shed.