Lawn Care: Mastering Lawn Stripes

Lawn stripes are both beautiful and useful as they can be used to conceal imperfections in your lawn such as different forms of grass. This is because stripes take the eye along the stripe, rather allow allowing it to focus on any spot or patch of difference in the lawn as a whole.

To master the perfect striped lawn, it's essential to follow a systematic pattern of mowing, preferably with a roller mower or by rolling the lawn following mowing.

Working out which direction the stripes should run:

• First, you need to cut along the edge of the lawn at right angles to the way that you want the stripes to run. Then cut back across the lawn, ensuring you overlap the second stripe onto the first stripe. Note that this is not your final lawn cut, it's just to make sure that the grass is cut right to the lawn border
• Turn your mower through ninety degrees
• Create the first real stripe pushing the mower along the edge if the lawn in the direction that you want your stripes to run
• Repeat this step when you reach the other end of the lawn, ensuring that you always push the mower, don't pull it behind you for some of the stripes as that will change the nature of the cut.

Top tips for great stripes

• When mowing, check each stripe as you go so that you are sure you have very slightly overlapped the previous stripe with the current one - strips of uncut grass left between the stripes look awful.
• If you have a lawn mower with side wheels, make sure the side wheels are actually travelling over the edge of the preceding stripe.

A striped lawn looks fantastic if done well, terrible if done badly. Image of oddly striped lawn courtesy of mer de glace.