Recently I’ve started my day by going for a walk. Leaving the house any time between 6:30am and 8am, coffee in hand, notebook and pen in pocket, no headphones, the route - it’s the same every morning - takes me up a nearby hill, and I’m home within an hour or so. How long I keep up this new routine is anyone’s guess, most likely mine.

The route takes me past my childhood home. If I crane my neck, I can peer over the wall to see the garden which my mother and father lovingly tended for the best part of three decades. I wonder now if it was a genuine love of horticulture, or simply a feeling of duty that compelled them to spend every Sunday afternoon in the garden planting, weeding, pruning, mowing.

I wouldn’t say that my father took more or less pride in the state of our lawn than anyone else in the street did of theirs. Not that it mattered, anyone less than 6 foot tall couldn’t see into our garden unless the gate was accidentally left open by the postman. And when that happened, my mother would demonstrate why - back in the day - she had held the Scottish national 220 yard sprint record for three years, by rushing from the kitchen, up the garden path to promptly close the gate on the outside world.

But Dad did take great pride in his lawn mower even though getting it started drove him insane. The machine itself was a shiny green metallic affair, petrol driven (2-stroke, whatever that means) and had a picture of a horse’s head on the grass box. This may have been to indicate the power of the engine i.e. one horsepower. Alternatively, given the mower’s weight and general unwieldlyness, either a suggestion that ideally a horse was required to pull the thing, or simply an indication that it was a beast to use.

The first step in the process of starting the mower consisted of some random fiddling about with the spark plugs. As far as I am aware, this achieved nothing except the occasional mild electric shock, accompanied by a mild expletive.

To actually get the engine going there was a starter cord. This was a length of rope which had attached to it at one end, a black Bakelite handle. You wound the other end around some part of the mower (a specific bit, not just any) and pulled sharply on the handle. If you were very lucky - I don’t think I ever witnessed this - the engine would jump into life straight away. But invariably my father would need to pull the handle a million times before he could make a start to cutting the grass.

To further complicate matters, at regular intervals, the rope would break necessitating the handle having to be reconnected to what was now a shorter cord, making the starting process all the more difficult. Love or duty; often one can tip over into the other.

One Saturday morning six years ago I was cycling back from - well, where else? - North Berwick, I was almost home, but for some reason I took a detour along a road which I know well, but I don’t usually take. And there it was: a ‘For Sale’ sign attached to what I’d always thought was just a tall stone garden wall, taller even than the wall that hid my Mum and Dad’s old garden.

It transpired that what was for sale was a cottage, hidden in plain sight, from the road. Writing at this desk looking back up towards our cottage, I realise how lucky we are, how lucky we were to find this place, how lucky we were that the person who bid more than us to buy it subsequently decided that they had bid too much.

There’s a late 19th century map of the area which shows a much larger house about 60 metres south of ours but which has long since been demolished. In between the two buildings there is marked an outline of a very formal garden with what looks like a large greenhouse to one side and a fountain in the centre. It makes me think that what is now our house was originally built as a gardener’s cottage.

I can’t now remember what the garden looked like when we moved in six years ago - it didn’t have a fountain, that’s for sure, and since that map it has acquired some beautiful trees. Certainly it needed a bit of tidying up and we’ve put in a few raised beds to grow vegetables. But we’re just making it up as we go along - we’ve got sunflowers, sweet peas, poppies, spring onions, coriander and mint all in the same place.

However, for the last five years I’ve been trying hard to keep the grass looking like “it should”, as if there is a rule about it. And to be honest, I’ve been fighting a losing battle. It was full of clover, plantain, dandelions, daisies, chickweed from the off, it was never going to look like the greens on the Old Course at St Andrews. Even my father’s horse-mower wouldn’t have helped.

So, I’ve given up using the mower altogether, just letting everything grow, gone full on meadow. And it looks far better already.

Laziness or rewilding; often one can tip over into the other.

Full On Meadow

Brian Wilson: In Triple Time