Last weekend I spent the best part of two hours mowing the lawn. This is not my favourite task: it comes ahead of using the vacuum cleaner or cleaning the bath (just), but way behind washing up or mending a puncture. Maybe somewhere around answering emails: a necessary evil. Why? Well, for one thing, it is quite tiring, without as far as I can see being very good exercise: a walk would be better for body and mind, and cycling to work beats mowing hands down. Also it is unpleasantly noisy: at this time of year, English suburbia rings to the throb of powered garden machinery, a kind of evening chorus, as solitary males display their fitness by competing to be loudest, sometimes flying off in a speeding courtship circuit on sit-on mowers.

But the main reason I dislike mowing is not its unproductive consumption of time, its ineffective burning of calories or the noise. It is that it seems such a stupid thing to do. Grass likes being cut. The more you cut it, the more it grows. If you fertilise it, and drill holes in it to aerate it, and kill weeds, it grows even faster. The alert gardener mows it every week, perhaps more often: especially as Spring turns into Summer, when days are long, the air warm, and the ground still moist (in May in Cambridgeshire you can almost hear grass growing). This is the challenge to which the eager gardener rises: you cut the grass and make it beautiful; it keeps growing, so you keep cutting so it remains beautiful.

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