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. I was reminded of Das Rheingold and the two giants, Fasolt and Fafner, building Valhalla as a new home for the gods. And when it was all done, and I could see how beautiful it was, I felt like singing Wotan’s paean, ‘Vollender das ewige Werk!’ Now it is up to me to ensure that this fine artefact of nature and human ingenuity gets the water its thirsty soul craves, so that it binds itself indissolubly with the earth and becomes the green still-centre of the garden, its perpetual curate and tenant-in-chief.

I like the word ‘lawn’; it has a soothing, luxurious sound. Of course it means two disparate things, of quite different origin albeit metaphysically connected. Lawn was a kind of fine linen, a brand name which the great etymologist, Professor Skeat, thought came from the town of Laon in France. Lawn was the material from which, in England, the broad sleeves of the bishops were made.