The Smell of Cut Grass

While leaving the gym after a rather low-effort training session, I found myself in low spirits. I enjoy pushing myself in the gym, and it is always a pleasure to leave with a sense of accomplishment. The gym is about a twenty-minute walk from my home, but the bus stops just around the corner, and today I decided to take it instead. I had once again begun reading Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, and I thought I might as well sit down and continue this short piece of literary history.

To be completely honest, I have never really enjoyed reading it. The writing style comes a little too close to the way my own thoughts move—jumping from one idea to another with no obvious destination. Much like my own mind, I am often left following long chains of thought that never quite seem to arrive at a conclusion. Perhaps this is a great insult to one of history’s greatest writers, though I mean none. I would hope he might understand my position.

When I arrived at the bus stop, I discovered that the next bus would not arrive for another thirty minutes. Although I had little desire to walk, I had even less desire to stand waiting for half an hour. So, with a sigh and a few quiet complaints to myself, I began the walk home.

For most of the journey there was little of interest. The path followed the roadside, offering neither pleasant sounds nor pleasant smells. Being summertime, the sun was also bright enough to make observing my surroundings less inviting. I apologise for this long list of complaints, but it truly was a rather uninspiring walk.

One could reasonably argue that this is the year 2026 and that I might simply have put on a pair of headphones and listened to music or a podcast. That would certainly have been an option. But after an intense morning of thinking, my mind already felt full. The last thing I wanted was more input.

As I came down a hill leading to a long, straight road, I caught a scent.

Both sides of the road were lined with tall grass, and the unmistakable smell of freshly cut grass suddenly filled the air. It stopped me in my tracks, partly because I could not immediately locate where it was coming from.

I took a deep breath.

With a little concentration, I realised it was not the familiar sweet scent of an ordinary freshly mown lawn. It seemed to come from a coarser variety of grass. Although the surrounding neighbourhood was filled with housing estates, and one might expect someone nearby to be mowing their garden, this smelled different. Neither did it possess the stronger, almost spicy aroma of timothy (Phleum pratense). It rested somewhere comfortably between the two.

At the end of the road, the grass along the roadside was being cut by larger machinery. Roadside vegetation, unlike a cultivated lawn, contains a diverse mixture of grasses and wild plants. I suspect this was the source of the scent. Perhaps it was even softened slightly by the exhaust from the passing traffic, tempering the natural release of the green leaf volatiles.

Smell has a fascinating relationship with memory. Few senses have the same ability to capture our attention so completely. I sometimes think that the sense of smell is one of the finest ways of practising attention itself. Yet, in our increasingly sterile environments, it is often forgotten. Beyond the occasional scent of cinnamon buns drifting from a café, we seldom think consciously about smelling the world around us.

That feels like a great shame.

Vision is unquestionably our dominant sense, and smell often seems to exist only in its shadow, quietly supporting our perception of the world. Yet I have always felt that, when we truly attend to it, smell may be the most pleasurable of them all.

The fragrance of a flower.

The aroma of the morning’s first cup of coffee.

Or, of course,

the smell of freshly cut grass.