The Turf Doctor

About The Turf Doctor

Franklin sits on clay and limestone, and in the flat heat of a July noon a lawn will tell you exactly what it thinks of that arrangement. The Turf Doctor reads yards for a living — where fescue is thinning under a hackberry, where bermuda is quietly winning, where a deck has been scalping the high spots out in Fieldstone Farms. The remedy is unhurried and repetitive: mowing at the right height, edging, trimming, and clearing the clippings, week after week through a Tennessee summer. Grass answers to steady attention more than to anything else anyone can do for it. Come the first cool evening in September, a lawn that was tended through the worst of it stands back up thick and even.