By my wristwatch it was 3.03am one night last week when the first fat rain fell. Plop, drop, plop. Woken by the noise, I rushed to the bedroom window to gawp at my poor, parched lawn.

In the middle of the night this was plainly a ridiculous thing to do, but I wanted to witness the moment the grass received its first drink for weeks. Would I hear the blades of grass smack their lips as they revived? Then there was the smell. The fragrance of fresh rain on arid turf is heavenly. Chanel should bottle it.

Why was I so obsessed about our lawn? It is not a particularly hearty specimen, as I have recently discovered. We have more flowery weeds than a West End chorus line. What is so special, to the British male, about his few square yards of greensward?

Having just made a Radio 4 documentary about lawns, I can tell you there are 15 million lawns in Britain, give or take a few, and they generate growth — both grassy and economic. Last year we spent £54 million on lawn fertilisers. We then forked out another £127 million on lawn mowers to cut the very same plots which had sprouted like billy-oh. Can this make sense?

In the Wirral, I visited Paul and Christine Davies, who have spent nine years creating a prize-winning, 1.3-acre lawn at their home. It was once a strawberry field and they showed me photographs of its former state: a jumble of fruit beds and agri-clutter. Now it’s a marvel of weed-free stripes, edges sharp as a teddy-boy’s sideburns.

Paul, a business consultant in his 50s, claimed to spend only 20 minutes a week tending his lawn. Christine gently corrected him, disclosing that her dear husband spends hours on the blessed thing.

Lawns do that. You lose track of time. They allow wives to get the man out of the house and they give chaps some peace and quiet. When you are at your mower, you cannot hear the telephone. Bliss. In Southport, Lancashire, I visited the Lawnmower Museum. You didn’t know Britain had a Lawnmower Museum? You ain’t lived.

It comprises a few upstairs rooms crammed with mowers and mower-ama, from medieval scythes to Seventies racing mowers (Go-Karts with teeth). There are Victorian exhortations to the homeowner to tend his acres, and there are cheesy magazine advertisements from the Seventies showing sideburned Sids atop their Wheel Horses mini-tractors.

The first lawns were probably found in medieval monasteries, where their very greenness was said to aid contemplation.

It was Francis Bacon, in a 1625 essay Of Gardens, who first described what we would understand as an English lawn. The intellectual Bacon was not much of a hands-on dibbler — no muddy fingernails for him — but he was gripped by the cerebral side of gardening. He called it ‘the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man’ and he was quite firm about what made a proper garden.

It should be square, surrounded by a ‘stately, arched hedge’, a distant patch of wilderness (thickets of sweet briar and honeysuckle) and, in the foreground, a lawn. ‘Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn,’ he wrote.

Francis Bacon’s garden in St Albans does not survive. The nearest we have to it in age is at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, where one finds Capability Brown’s 1760s Salisbury Lawns (so named because they seemed to be almost as big as Salisbury Plain!).

Chatsworth is the home of the Duke of Devonshire and His Grace takes an engagingly laid-back approach. There are no Keep Off The Grass signs. Nor are chemicals used to keep down the weeds.

Enormous lawns at houses such as Chatsworth weren’t just there to soothe the eye. They demonstrated your wealth. Sward swank. Maintaining such lawns cost a fortune. That meant a multitude of sheep, goats, four-legged lawn mowers. If you didn’t want them littering your idyll, you needed gangs of men with scythes.

Lawns remained the domain of the wealthy until 1830 when Edwin Budding, an engineer from Stroud, Gloucestershire, patented an invention which would transform our country — not just socially but also in the way it looked and sounded. It was the first mechanical lawn mower.

That Budding were a hefty beast. At the Lawnmower Museum, curator Brian Raddam let me push a replica. Hard work. But this revolutionary design — big roller at the back, cutting cylinder at the front — has changed little in nearly two centuries. It marked the beginning of the end for skilled scythe men.

Anyone could now cut grass. Initially, the Buddings cost a packet but the machines soon became cheaper and the ideal of tidy lawns spread to a blooming bourgeoisie. Numerous manufacturers competed for this popular new market, their names today evoking classic images of summer — Ransomes, Shanks, Atco, Dennis.

'Lawns voice our pride as homeowners. They keep us out of the pub, away from the computer screen for a few hours'

Ah Dennis. Do you remember that swirly trademark and the great green buckets in which the cut grass could be collected and then dumped at one end of the garden?

As a teenager I mowed for pocket money, piloting a giant Dennis with clanking pieces of machinery, green spray of fresh-cut grass fountaining in their wake.

The first petrol mowers appeared in the late 1890s. Someone came up with a steam mower. Electric jobs came in the 1920s. And herein lies a smudgy-cheeked point of lawns for many a bloke: the chance to play with machines. Tom Fort, author of the seminal lawns history The Grass Is Greener, told me that ‘the only machine I have ever formed a relationship with is a lawn mower’. To tinker for oily hours with your mower in the shed: for some men, there is no finer thing.

Gardeners must be on guard. Moles are a problem. Mr Velvet Jacket can overnight humble the most fussy of lawn perfectionists. You go to bed thinking you have a perfect lawn. The next morning little mounds of fresh-clawed earth have sprung up in the middle of your billiard table. Aiee!

With strychnine poison now illegal, moles are booming. I interviewed a mole-catcher, Sheila Price — the lawn world’s answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger — and she chuckled that she had never been so busy.

In addition to moles, lawn addicts are on the look-out for plant invaders such as mosses and lichens. What wonderful names some have: violas, harebells, tormentil, ladies bedstraw, cat’s ear and ox-eyed daisy (hey, isn’t she our local barmaid?).

A lawn expert, Mike Seaton, F. Inst. G (Dip), came to inspect my lawn. Those initials after Mike’s name mark him down as a Fellow Member of the Institute of Groundsmanship. Mike is the lawn world’s equivalent of a Harley Street specialist.

I showed him our back lawn, which we like to think of as our best bit of turf. It was before the drought and the lawn was looking pretty splendid, though I say so myself.

Mike crouched down, had a quick rummage, pulled a face. ‘Eighty per cent weed,’ he declared. Furthermore, with a quick glance at the patterns on the lawn he was able to tell precisely what type of lawn-mower I used — and that I needed to change the blade on my sit-on mower. Here was a herbicultural Hercule Poirot.

So why put ourselves through this torment? Well, lawns are a green canvas for the flower gardener. They are a battleground where man can tame Nature. Lawns may also add to the value of our property. All this from a few square yards of grass.

In Britain, we tend to be quite private about them, keeping them hidden behind the sort of hedges stipulated by Bacon. In America, where they adopted our Anglo-Saxon interest in lawns and turbo-charged it, such privacy is frowned on. Your lawn is open for all to see — and comment on.

The lawn has become a symbol of one’s civic dedication. Environmentalists are not keen on lawns, arguing that mowers cause pollution and that lawns waste water. I have certainly never watered a lawn. Grass springs back so fast after a drought, it just seems pointless.

There is also the argument that lawns bring out the proud fool in homeowners.

The French laugh at us for our lawn obsession. In one of the Asterix cartoon books, a suburban Englishman loses his temper when Roman soldiers are about to march across his lawn. He holds them up with a bristling pitchfork, one indignant moustache facing an entire legion.

The British male is a tolerant beast. You can tease him, tax him, even lure his popsy to a waltz. But threaten his lawn and he will come over all unnecessary. Or so we long thought. A recent trend for concreting over front lawns (to turn them into parking spaces) and the invention of — shudder — plastic grass may suggest that our love affair with lawns is on the wane. We’ll have to see about that.

For what is so wrong with a little tight-mown order in this lurching gallop of modern life? Lawns voice our pride as homeowners. They keep us out of the pub, away from the computer screen for a few hours. Velvety, verdant stripes of grass can set off beds of romantic hollyhocks. Drifts of ripened roses never look better than when presented with a British lawn.

And is that not it? From the first cough of mowers in spring to October’s final barrowload of clippings, the lawn, so needy, so nurtured, is a thing we British do exceeding well.

The lawn is an emblem of Albion and it makes the rest of the world go green — with envy.