Spring is here, which means lawn care circulars in the suburbs. Paper ads through the U.S. mail that is, which somehow doesn’t seem to be obsolete. Sure, I’ve edged into pre-dotage, but it can’t just be old people who still respond to advertising postcards.

Weed Man (registered trademark) promises weed control (I’d hope so), but also core aeration, lawn fertilization and all manner of other control: crabgrass control, grub control, and mosquito control, and I guess for all the other bugs not covered in those categories, insect control. Also, “landscape bed control,” which I can’t quite visualize.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen an ad from Weed Man, or ever heard of it, but I am woefully ignorant of the world of organized lawn care. The card has a professionally produced aspect, so I suspected that it is a large operation. So it is. Franchised.

Weed Man’s web site says (sic): “The first Weed Man turf grass Professional was Desmond Rice, who established his business in 1970 in Mississauga, Ontario. In 1976, he decided to grow the business through franchising. Today, there are more than 300 Weed Man franchises providing Professional horticultural services across Canada, the USA, and in the United Kingdom.”

Ah, Mississauga. Few other places in the world do I have such fond memories of a water treatment plant.

Sad to say, Des Rice, founder of the Weed Man empire, passed from this world of lawns back in 2011.

“He was 100 percent business. Every ounce of energy and every hour he was awake, he was thinking about business and about Weed Man,” his right-hand man Mike Kernaghan told Lawn & Landscape soon after his death.

For $30 + tax, a Weed Man tech will show up to assess my lawn’s potential for de-weedification. Probably they do fine work, but I must pass. They call them weeds. I call it biodiversity.

Still, the name Weed Man is inspired. It could have been the title of cheaply made flick for drive-ins and low-budget movie houses of the Eisenhower era. The name inspired me to go to a random AI generative site and ask the robot brain to paint me a picture.

“Weed Man” seemed a little too slender as a prompt, so I made it, “Weed Man emerging from the forest.”

Not bad. You know, I think I’ve seen him before. Well, Conifer Man anyway.