Maytime and ‘Some wet, bird-haunted English lawn’

The best thing this country has ever produced is a fine-sown, closely mown and weedless lawn. You really relish it this sunny time of year, when it becomes a work of art, or as Wordsworth put it, ‘a carpet all alive/ With shadows flung from leaves’. I have been thinking about lawns because ours, in London, the green punctuation mark between the steps leading down from my library, and my beloved cedar studio, had become hopelessly overgrown with moss. So a friendly lorry, controlled by a gruff-jovial man and his hard-working daughter, delivered an immense number of sausage-rolls of new turf. Then along came two immensely tall young men — giants — who stripped away the old surface, loaded the detritus into plastic bags, dug up and smoothed the under-surface, and then with exquisite precision laid down the new billiard table. It took them two days of intense industry and impressive skill.