I’ve just mown the lawn for the first time this year (about a month too late – but despite living at the top of a hill, we’re waterlogged all winter).
Triumph: I only had to clean the spark plug and top up the oil – and the mower started first time.
The smell of cut grass is one of those small pleasures in life: probably best appreciated drifting from a way away with the distant buzz of the mower, shouts of “Howzat”, and a glass of cool ginger beer shandy in hand. Well, that’s what I remember from long ago when I had spare time...
The aroma is, I read, chiefly given by an aromatic alcohol called cis-3-hexanol. The only thing better, IMO, is the aroma of good meadow hay – the chief constituent of which is coumarin. Opening a bale of hay in the middle of winter is like seeing a small slice of summer: compressed grass, perhaps the flash of a pressed purple knapweed flower, and that wonderful scent.
I tend to use haylage these days as small-bale hay is harder to find – but its bucolic cideriness is no match for hay, I have to say.
Those of you who get your perfume hits in the sterile air of the department store cosmetics floor just don’t realise what you are missing!
28/03/07 @ 16:31