A leaflet came through my door. “We’ll help you get the lawn of your dreams,” it said. I doubt it I thought. I read on to see if I was right. “ESSENTIAL TREATMENTS,” the leaflet shouted. Before saying more quietly, “Bespoke treatments to keep your lawn and garden looking healthy.” Then there was a list of potential treatments which included ‘weed control’, ‘fungicide’ and ‘insect control’. The ‘looking healthy’ the leaflet refers to is clearly a subjective thing, or some use of the word healthy that I’m not familiar with.

When I was a kid, I lived in a suburban semi-detached house that was blessed with both front and back gardens. The back garden was a hundred feet long, but its lawn was a postage stamp. The front lawn wasn’t much bigger. My dad mowed them so they didn’t grow very tall and so his children could play on the grass as that’s basically what it was for.

There were other grassy bits: paths, the area under the apple tree, the bit in front of the shed and again my dad mowed them so we could walk on them easily. I don’t think he had any dreams about lawns or fantasies of what they should be like. I did though. I wanted a lawn with daisies growing in it and complained to my dad about our daisyless status. I can’t remember what he said, but I think it was a combination of not being entirely against the idea, but also not knowing how to achieve it. (I will add that this was the 1980s and campaigns to grow wildflowers in gardens and pay attention to ‘bees needs’ were not around then, whereas now you could just buy yourself some daisy seeds.)

We may not have had daisies, but we had clover and plantain and at the edges – where long before ‘No Mow May’ my dad didn’t cut – there were different species of grass. The wheaty one with the ‘dart’ you could throw and embed in people’s clothes – preferably without their knowledge so they would find it later and wonder how it got there. The delicate one that looked like a miniature tree and whose leaves you could plunder to form a tiny bouquet which was almost immediately scattered like confetti. The slender but chunky one that looked a bit like a mini bulrush and felt pleasantly furry to the touch.

Writing about them now, I am a child, back in that garden touching the grasses and taking pleasure in their different appearances and textures. I recall wanting more types of grass, not fewer, and daisies. I suppose that’s the lawn of my dreams.

The front garden lawn was at least decorated with common cat’s ear, a name I didn’t know at the time. I simply thought of them as ‘flowers which look a bit like dandelions’, which we also had. Although there were not enough dandelions to mean that we didn’t need to pick their leaves elsewhere, as food for our tortoise, who was a fan of Richard Mabey. Said tortoise was also fond of buttercups, the appearance of which was capable of genuinely making him run across the room if they were placed on his food mat.

I’m not sure people still commonly keep tortoises as pets, perhaps for the same reason that they are hell bent on tidying their gardens as they were sitting rooms and royalty was coming to visit. (That said, tortoises do have wild toilet habits and as far as I know can’t be housetrained. I suppose that’s why my parents were in no hurry to replace the ugly carpet with its swirly pattern of creams and browns.)

Perhaps these tortoiseless neatniks dream of lawns mown to the equivalent of a number one haircut and leaflets such as the one which prompted me to write this would be music to their ears. For me though such a medicated lawn, devoid of character and without flowers, bees or beetles, is the stuff of nightmares.