In most Slavic languages, the old name for May was April. Although Lock starts in April, in May it really grows. I wasn't fully aware of that until ten years ago when we were within reach Kosmaya bought a cottage with a quarter hectare of land. My previous experience with mowing was negligible. When I was a child, we had a cottage in Shatornja at the foot of Rudnik, but the plot was more than twice as small and mowing was not my concern. As a city child, my father tried to find someone in front of the village store willing to do the job for the compensation he determined and cut grass (future hay). It was not easy for him to succeed. Fortunately, it was mowed only two or three times a year, that is, when the grass grows well (after all, it can only be mowed with a scythe).
Now times have changed and I, as a city child, also do not know how to use my hair, but I have at my disposal machinery that did not exist or was too expensive forty years ago: a motor trimmer, which is first used to mow along the fence and trees, which makes it easier to mow with the main tool, a powered lawnmower, which then does not have to be maneuvered around the trees. From the perspective of my quarter-century-older colleague originally from Piva, who wrote in the preface of one of his books that he likes to mow the meadow barefoot at dawn because that is how he makes contact with his ancestors, I am completely alienated from nature by technology. And my immediate ancestor, as I said, did not mow either. Unlike him, for whom mowing the lawn was a headache, it is a pleasure for me, so I don't mind that it has to be done every second or third week. What do I enjoy?
First, in movement. Four or five hours of movement, which is how long it takes me to mow the plot, pleases me as a person whose job is mainly related to sitting, reading and writing. Movement, as psychology has long proven, helps thinking: while I perform the mechanical action of driving a lawnmower, the brain is free to deal with what I have read the previous days or the texts I am working on, to review and rework them or to come up with new concepts. The text you are reading was created during mowing, I am just writing it down now. I also often - God bless wireless headphones - listen to radio broadcasts that I missed on previous working days: nothing better than starting a Saturday morning mowing with Sonya or Jovanin Gutenberg's answer from the previous day. Of course, I also listen to music: for some reason, Traveling Wilburys are the most common choice on that occasion.
I enjoy, of course, the mowing process itself. From the beginning, I prescribed to myself that I would be guided by the morals of the old master fresco painters, who painted with equal care what they did not expect anyone to ever see. Therefore, every corner is equally important and the satisfaction comes from knowing that even the "invisible" is done as best as possible (there are similarities with writing books). Since the plot is shaped like an English garden, full of asymmetrically distributed trees and bushes (although there was some logic in their planting), you can't simply go back and forth with the mower, so every time I slightly change the path I take and research which mowing patterns are the most efficient. Or the most interesting: there is a special beauty even in a half-mown plot, in the relationship between mowed and unmowed, which changes with each new pass. It is a pleasure to watch how the tufted, slightly battered jambolia turns into a flat carpet, how gradually there is less and less messy grass and more and more smooth greenery, until at the end I say to myself: "Ah, ki pista in Pranjani!"
The greatest pleasure comes at the end - in watching the mown. When I sit on the terrace and observe the temporary perfection of domesticated nature, it is a moment of tranquility in which there is nothing but to enjoy the beauty of the balance of nature and my work. In just a few days it won't be perfect anymore, the grass will grow at different speeds in different places and the carpet will soon become a jambolia again. But at that moment the balance is complete, and the awareness of the temporary gives it a special charm: that beauty is a captured moment of peace, a step out of constant movement. There is also comfort in the temporary nature of what has been cut: the necessity of re-mowing preserves the possibility that the next time will be even better (it can always be better, so what I write, also trying to tear something away in the course of time, I always fix for the second edition).
Contrary to the pretentious imposition of geometric form on nature in the French garden, the English garden is culture in the best sense of the word, the cultivation of nature whose incomparably greater strength than man's is respected. A French or English garden - that's a whole philosophy of living. Cultivating an English garden means accepting things as they are, improving them as much as possible and acknowledging one's own limitations, enjoying the moment just because it is a moment and coming to terms with one's own temporality, simultaneously surrendering to the flow of life and making sense of it - living Hogarth's winding line of beauty.
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