Rootless
I carried on digging up the cherry tree roots, and finally got them all out, or all the big ones near the surface, anyway.
Cherry roots dug up
I had hoped that there might be a surplus of soil because the level of the lawn was too high around the cherry tree. No such luck. Indeed, I probably need to import some more soil from the last undeveloped part of the garden. On the plus side, I managed to squish at least 20 cockchafer larvae and two leatherjackets while digging the area over.
I am still thinking about what to do about the back garden lawn. One option is to have the lawn level in the middle, but have it sloping up or down near the edges to match the level of the edging. A level lawn is an advantage if you want to put chairs out and sit on it, but I haven’t done this for years. Alternatively I could make the lawn slope from side to side and front to back uniformly across the area. I think that the option I choose will depend on how extreme the difference is, and I haven’t yet determined this.
With one more day of my week off work to go, I am feeling deeply tired from all this labour. I really hope it rains tomorrow. All day. Interestingly, the Met Office has a maximum probability of precipitation of 50% at 0700, but a yellow warning for rain. Maybe the warning is that, with 50% or less chance of rain, we will all be very surprised if the rain happens and will forget our coats and umbrellas.