THE GRASS IS GREENER
An Anglo-Saxon Passion Our Love Affair with the Lawn
TOM FORT

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

Copyright © Tom Fort 2000

Tom Fort asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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PRAISE
THE GRASS IS GREENER

‘Here is cultural history at its best: the story of the lawn, and the implements used to cut it, and the place it has in our culture and psyche. It is clear that the author is in thrall to the green stuff, as there is a wonderful personal account of the first lawnmower in his life, and of the details of his ongoing struggle to develop his own lawn to a level he feels satisfied with’

Country Life

‘A confident writer, he meanders into social commentary, definitions of Englishness and observations on masculinity, without ever going too far from his subject. I bet he can mow in straight lines’

New Statesman

‘Fort’s own perspective is, however, resolutely gardenesque. He loves lawns and lawnmowers. They are entangled with his dearest memories. He is a founder-member of the Old Lawnmower Club (membership 249 men and one woman) and the enthusiasm that pervades his book can make even that seem not ridiculous but somehow admirable’

Sunday Times

‘Even those without green fingers will find Fort’s hymn to horticulture entertaining. So you mad workers have nothing to lose but your daisy chains. Go on, stay in bed this weekend, give us all a rest’

Yorkshire Post

‘Tom Fort … in this ardent summertime essay on lawns and lawnmowers, conjures up a multitude of green thoughts in a green shade. Marvellous!’

Irish Times

‘Mower Man’s full blown identity is explored for the first time by Tom Fort. Ostensibly about the English love of lawns, The Grass is Greener is more an apologia for ‘our man’, as Fort puts it, and his intimate relationship with his beloved lawn’

Financial Times

‘I must admit that I did enjoy this celebration of my garden bete noire. This says a great deal about the achievement of the author. Fort has a lightness of touch which makes this book oddly beguiling as he hurtles us from the herber (medieval garden) down to today’s average patch of greenery. This is an effortless … and funny read’

The Mail on Sunday

‘The Grass is Greener is a discursive and jolly book … Tom Fort comes into his own after the days of scythes and besoms, with the invention of the mechanical mower: “a small, peaceful revolution”.’

Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review

DEDICATION

To my mother

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

DEDICATION

Prelude

Part One

In the Beginning

Pleasures of the Green

Shaven Lawns and Vapid Greens

The Moral Lawn

Musings from The Shed (1)

Albert’s Morning March

Part Two

Budding Genius

The Budding’s Flowering

The Glory of the Garden

Velvet Robes

Greensward and Minimum Bovver

Musings from the Shed (2)

Lawn Order, Man’s Business

Part Three

The Lawnsmen

The Mowermen

My Sward and Others

KEEP READING

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PRELUDE

The Lawnsman Cometh

It is mid-April, anywhere in suburban England, anywhere among a million courts, crescents, closes, avenues, drives, groves, ways; anywhere the ornamental cherries are in pink flower and the hanging baskets standing guard by the front porch are glowing with spring colour. It is a Saturday. Enough of the morning has gone for breakfast to have been eaten, for the newspaper to have separated into its dozen sections, for the dog to have been tickled behind the ears and the wife brought her tea, for the milk bottles to have been deposited by the step with a dissonant chime; for that breeze, carrying with it the first foretaste of the warmth of summer, to have rid the little kingdom behind the house of the worst of the clammy moisture night has laid on it. Already our man has found time amid his chores to go out and sniff the air. Its savour has brought a softening to his features, a shadow of a smile, while resolving them into an expression of purpose.

I say ‘our man’, because apart from his maleness and sense of purpose and the fact that he is likely to be between thirty and four score years, I cannot characterize him further. He may be shaven or stubble-chinned, regimentally smart or irredeemably scruffy, self-employed or nine-to-five wage slave, respectably retired, painfully redundant. His demeanour and circumstances tell us nothing. All we may safely say of him is that he cares for the order of the space by his home. We must see him in action.

By now he will, morally, have cleared the decks. He may have walked the dog, made the breakfast, got the paper, tapped the barometer, discharged half a dozen trivial duties; or he may have just rolled out of bed, grabbed a cup of instant and surveyed the scene. In both cases, he will have endeavoured to dispose of clutter. He will have organized himself to be free from distractions. Before his task is done, he will not wish to go to the supermarket or welcome guests. Demands which interfere are likely to make him extremely irritable.

There are preliminaries to the observances. He will dress, not necessarily with care, but properly: perhaps in a boiler suit, or ragged sweater and filthy oil-stained jeans; in what he calls his ‘garden shoes’, or just grubby trainers. Whatever the outfit, it will be indissolubly associated in his mind with the garden and the duties laid on him by it. With it belong the well-worn gloves, dirt behind the fingernails, the odour of bonfire lingering about the hair, an ache in the lower back, a sudden and virtuous need for tea, that particular expulsion of breath that accompanies a satisfied survey of a job well done.

At ease in the familiar raiment, he makes his way to the shed. To the ignorant observer, this structure will be no more than a utilitarian assembly of wood, brick or breeze block, surmounted by a corrugated roof. More often than not, its condition is decrepit, if not ruinous. But it would be erroneous to deduce deficiency of regard from this neglect. To our man, the shed represents a precious antithesis to the home. It speaks to him of an older, more elemental life. It is a place where he is master, where standards other than those of cleanliness and neatness and newness apply.

To our man, the harsh monosyllable – ‘shed’ – has a comforting, spiritual resonance. His secular self acknowledges that it is a dumping ground for tools, machinery, teetering towers of old flowerpots, cobweb-festooned stacks of garden chairs with rotted canvas seats, bags of Growmore, packets of ant powder, bottles of weedkiller with tops that will not turn, brushes rigid with ancient creosote, drums of unruly wire netting with last autumn’s leaves held crispy in the mesh, loops of wire hanging from rusty nails, saws with rusting teeth which he has intended to oil and clean these past five years, and a great accumulation of other relics.

But to him it is much more than a mere storage space. It is a sanctum, a private place where his soul is nourished. It should have the quiet of a chapel, although in a good cause that may be fractured by electric drill or thumping hammer blows. There is much dust, but it lies still, and the old flies caught in the cobwebs in the corners are undisturbed. The shed is like his mind, crammed with the forgotten, the half-forgotten and the redundant. In its recesses teeter piles of junk, which – if ever retrieved – at once spill their old stories. It is a place to pause, to contemplate, to sniff that rich, musty old smell, to pick up things and put them down again, to arrange and rearrange. It is a place with a force of its own; which he respects, because each time he rolls up his sleeves and becomes extremely dirty imposing order on it, it reverts in its own time to disorder. That is as it should be.

On this morning, our man does not linger among the shadows. He has pressing business with a machine in green. He finds his gloves, slips his hands into their familiar griminess, grasps the well-worn handles, and drags it forth into the sunlight. It may be a modest contraption, requiring no more than a steady push for it to do its work. It may be electric and murmur as it goes, or be powered by petrol, and roar. The motion of its blades may be forward or circular. It may be a foot wide, or four. It may have cost ten pounds at a jumble sale, or three thousand from a showroom. Its common characteristics are its colour – it is, or should be, green – and its function, which is to cut grass.

Although the fundamentals of the ensuing ritual do not vary much, the mood of the devotees does, in a way dictated by the condition of the machine. This has little to do with its cost or quality, but rather the manner in which it was put to rest at the end of the previous mowing season. Broadly speaking, there is a gulf between those who, recognizing that the season is at an end and that another will inevitably come, clean, oil, repair and cover their mowers; and those who do not. I make no moral judgement here, which is as well, for I belong in the second category. It is the case that those in the second category would often wish themselves in the first, while the converse does not apply.

That futile longing is usually at its most intense on this Saturday morning in April. Those who tended properly to their machines when the leaves were tumbling last November can now regard them with a virtuous smile. The metalwork gleams, the pale tops of the spark plugs wink, the cutters are dark and smooth and sharp (for they have been taken to the workshop in early winter, when they received prompt and unhurried care). This machine is primed and ready.

Contrast this to the shame of us in the second category. We view our machine, not with a self-satisfied smirk, but a grimace of horror. The plug is buried under a clod of slimy, decomposed vegetable matter. There is still grass in the box, mixed with dark, rotted leaves. The cutters are rimmed with accretions of hard earth and fossilized herbage; and, worse, when you scrape this off, you find the cutting edge itself mutilated and split by collisions with stones. You remember: how you swore, but a few months back, that this time you would cherish your loyal servant and attend to its needs; how you finished that last mow as dusk and a dozen competing demands closed in; how you wheeled it, still warm and smoking, into the shed, and abandoned it with your promise; how winter came and the garden became dank, dreary and repulsive, the shed cold and uninviting.

Never mind. It has endured the same each winter and come through. If it had a mind, it would doubtless wish you in the first category as well. But that is a matter of secondary importance, when there is work to be done.

Before operations begin, our man will scout the terrain. Consciously or unconsciously, he will sense that the grass beneath his feet has lost the flabby inertness of its dormancy. There is a spring to it. It is quickening with restored life. Its lustre, the sprouting of the daisies and clover, simultaneously gladden his heart and remind him of his duty. He is most unlikely to stop and ponder why this should be; what it is within him that is fulfilled by the annual taking up of the challenge. He has neither the time nor the inclination to analyse the nature of the drama. There is a lawn to be mowed.

Now, for the first time, we hear the Saturday music of the mower. As sound, it is horrible: loud, discordant, disconnected, structureless. But to those of the faith there is a mysterious sweetness to it. Familiarity annihilates its brutishness, leaving its rhythms, its pauses, its cadences, its crescendos and diminuendos, to exercise their role as indispensable accompaniment to the ritual.

In the case of the push mower and the electric mower, sound and purposeful action come together. But for the petrol-driven mower, there is an overture, initiated by the pulling of the starter rope or cranking of the handle. With first-category devotees, this will be brief: an introductory bar consisting of a couple of smooth pulls, before the rich orchestra of the motor adds its throaty weight. For second-category worshippers, the overture may well be protracted; indeed, it may well be the prelude, not to mowing the lawn at all, but to a hurried dash to the repair shop, a thoroughly unfruitful exchange with an overburdened mechanic, and a day of painful non-consummation.

But this day we will have none of that. The cutters are unclogged, the layers of old muck prized off, the oil checked, the petrol tank filled. The handle is pulled once, twice, three times. The wheel revolves lifelessly. The flow of fuel is checked, the plug cleaned. The rope is yanked in earnest, with a silent prayer that it will not – as has been known – snap in the middle. Now there is, at last, an answering cough, like that of a half-drowned man. It dies, and there are further twiddlings with accelerator and choke. Again the rope is pulled, and this time the music of returning life is heard. Smoke belches, black as impurities are incinerated, then blue. With the depression of the accelerator, the volume increases. The cutters are engaged and the music acquires breadth and depth, as when the tubas and trombones join the orchestra.

For a moment our man is held by the sound, and by the power transmitted from the engine through the handles to his forearms. These forces enclose him, shutting him off from the world of bird song, barking dogs, aeroplanes, his squealing children, a wife who would trouble him with shopping lists or holiday brochures. He grips the handles tight, and guides the machine towards the grass. As he meets the lawn, the cutters engage. The first shower, lush and juicy, shoots forth into the box, emerald spattered with the white of the daisies. But our man’s appreciation of the aesthetics is unconscious. His intelligence is focussed on the line he must follow.

The creation of the pattern is central to the ritual. One of the old textbooks recommends that the most pleasing effect is achieved by starting with the outer circumference, and mowing in a continuous, decreasing circuit until the centre is reached and shorn. But that requires what few of us have, a lawn shaped in the shape of a symmetrical oval or circle. Our man observes orthodox practice. He executes two careful circuits of the outer edge to give himself a margin, and once the furthest curve permits, he cuts across it in the first straight lines. As he moves into the main body of the lawn, the lines become longer. It is in the sculpting of those lines that his spirit receives much of its nourishment. Here is rhythm, regularity, the measured tread behind the devouring machine, the sweeping turn at each end as the whizzing blades slice the air within inches of the heads of flowers or the buds of shrubs, before the controlled flourish is completed and it is back to the straight and narrow. And all the time the proportion of the grass which has succumbed to our man’s control appreciably and visibly grows, and that left in its quasi-natural state diminishes.

By the time he halts the machine to empty the box for the first time, the comforting familiarity of the ritual has reclaimed him. He may put his nostrils close to the damp mass of cuttings, inhale that fresh, innocent smell which speaks to him of his history as a mower and the lawns he has mown. His pleasure is conscious now, as he marches the old route to his compost heap, lying in mouldering peace in some unregarded corner of his domain, and lays the season’s first bright offering over the tea leaves, coffee grinds, potato peel and cabbage stalks. He may pause a moment to spread the cuttings, thinking how many more times he will perform this office before the season of growth is out. Before he is finished this day, that deposit will be buried deep, its greenness yielding to yellow and grey as the bacteria go to work.

Back to his waiting machine our man strides. A quick push or two on the accelerator – whose results are audible half way down the street – and he is off again. See how the beast eats up the ground, while his feet fall with firm, noiseless tread on the beheaded blades. The flower bed looms, but he does not begin the turn until full contiguity with his previous stripe is accomplished. The faded daffodil heads will surely be lost; but no, he sweeps in a circle, tilting back the snarling cutters, easing back on the accelerator, his body following in a disciplined arc. And the next stripe is laid.

Thus, by measurable degree, the task is performed. Somewhere deep inside our man, a need is answered. Were he to be questioned, he would mumble something about having to keep the place tidy. His machine has brought order to the lawn; he orders the machine. A psychologist might identify a different order of precedence among the elements of man, machine and herbage; wondering who or what was really in control, who was whose servant, who whose master; might search deeper still, into the possible symbolism of the stripes, recollections of marks inflicted or suffered in school canings, sublimations of flagellistic or masochistic urges. Our man’s need might be inadequacy, his desire for control an obsession, his adherence to ritual a mask for a pathetic deficiency of self-esteem.

What is beyond dispute is that, for whatever jumble of reasons, when the mowing is finished that April morning our man will be contented. He hurls the last boxful of cuttings on to the now gently steaming heap, and turns back to view with quiet complacency the effect of his stripes. He silences his machine and returns it to its place of rest, perhaps offering a tribute to its dependability as he wipes the cutters clean with an oily rag. He throws down his gloves, with their new stains of green, beats off the spattering of grass attached to his shins, stamps his feet, becomes aware again of the extraordinary amount of noise birds make. He is ready to do battle in the supermarket, welcome a tiresome guest, play football with a clamorous son, attend to his beloved; to pick up again his spot in the society of human beings. He is strengthened by what he has done; and a good part of his comfort lies in the fact that – whether or not he is conscious of it at that moment – he must do the same next week, and the week after that, and every week until the earth again tires of making things grow.

PART ONE

In the Beginning

Care must be taken that the lawn is of such a size that about it in a square can be planted every sweet-smelling herb. Upon the lawn, too, against the heat of the sun, trees should be planted, so the lawn may have a delightful, cooling shade

ALBERTUS MAGNUS, Count of Bollstadt

It is the rather tedious convention among gardening historians to begin with Genesis, which tells us that God created the first garden, eastward in Eden, and Adam the first gardener. The complacent assumption is that the Creator ordained gardening as humankind’s pre-eminent recreation; that in the garden, of whatever kind, he gave a virtuous echo of that first perfect state; and that, by implication, the garden would for ever be a source of solace and spiritual improvement. Should we also presume that in Eden the essentials were provided: not merely the earth, the seed, water and warmth, and perhaps a useful implement or two; but also the aspiration to cultivate that rich soil in a manner pleasing to the eye and refreshing to the spirit?

The historians seize upon Genesis because it is somewhere to start, like a footpath sign. But scarcely have they taken the first steps along the path than it disappears into the dark, impenetrable tangle of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and early medieval Britain. They halt to scour the old chronicles, searching for a shard of light in the twilit thicket. But they are disappointed. There is enough evidence about life in first millennium Britain to show, for instance, that it was uncertain and often violent, that some held to the faith of Christ, that a minute handful could read and write, that amid the darkness the yearning to create beauty occasionally stirred and found expression. But of glimmers of interest in the garden as a diversion, the chronicles are almost bare. So they blunder on through the wildwood, until suddenly a shaft of sunlight does break through, and where it strikes the ground a sprig of green is visible.

They rush towards it, falling upon it with desperate relief; and at once begin constructing great edifices. A reference is found in the annals of Ely to the planting by Abbot Brithnod of gardens and orchards, which is taken as proof that a tradition of ecclesiastical horticulture was firmly in place before the end of the 10th century. In some dusty record of domestic purchases, a note is found to the effect that three-and-tenpence was spent on turf for the London garden of the Earl of Gloucester’s curiously named brother, Bogo de Clare, from which is deduced a general enthusiasm among the 13th-century aristocracy for disporting themselves on cultivated grass. And from similarly nugatory smatterings are derived such absurdities as ‘medieval men loved their flowers’. It would indeed be cheering to know that, in those brutish days, some knew their pinks and carnations, cherished mulberry and pear trees, even laid turves and lived long enough to see the grass grow. Perhaps there were knights who occasionally dismounted from their palfreys to pick nosegays for their ladies, and paused awhile, fumbling for a way to express their tender feelings in elegant prose. But we may be sure that feuding, fighting, intriguing, keeping their subordinates in order and promoting their good offices with their lord counted for a great deal more.

Go back almost two thousand years, to the heart of the Roman empire at its zenith, to Pliny’s garden near Ostia, where you might have strolled between hedges of box and mulberry, listening to your host moralizing about the destruction of Pompeii; or to his Tuscan villa where the terrace sloped to a soft and liquid lawn, surrounded by paths and topiary, shaded by cypress and plane trees. Here, far removed from the noise of war, men’s thoughts could turn to the pleasures of food and wine, and to beauty, the arts of poetry and sculpture, the taming of nature into a garden.

Go back a thousand years, to pre-Conquest Britain. Here, men laboured to exist, and generally did not exist very long. Sharing their wattle and mud hovels with their livestock and attendant multitudes of vermin, they rose at daybreak, toiled through the hours of daylight on the land, devoured their dismal sludge of beans and stewed vegetables, went to sleep; and did that most of the days of their adult lives. Nor was the existence of their feudal lords much more refined. Their homes may have been bigger, but they were just as draughty, dark and smelly. They ate much the same food and were eaten by the same fleas. True, they did not spend their days in manual drudgery. But the round of banditry, quarrelling, organizing and repelling raids, and the duties of providing and beseeching protection which alone offered any hope of stability in a turbulent world, can have left little enough daytime for anything much beyond sharpening battle axes and watching backs.

It is likely that a handful among the very richest among Britain’s Roman rulers included ornamental gardens within their villas. Excavations at Fishbourne in Sussex have revealed that, in the centre of a resplendent first-century country house, was a courtyard laid out as a garden, with a walk flanked by ornamental arbours and shrubs, and possibly beds of violets, pansies, lilies and assorted herbs. At a humbler level, the Celtic monks most probably made gardens of a kind within their monasteries and beside their huts; and the greater religious institutions – such as Ely – may well have boasted more extensive cultivated grounds.

However, it was not until well after the coming of William and his Norman knights that the seedbed was laid on which the island’s first civilizing influences would eventually germinate and flower. It took time to impose Norman order on a barbarian territory infected for centuries by chronic disorder, and much killing and brutality. But the slow, reluctant bowing of the Anglo-Saxon shoulder opened the way to blessings the land had never known, chief among which was an emerging confidence in freedom from invasion. The establishment of a structure of government, however harsh and oppressive it was, undoubtedly assisted the birth of an idea of nationhood, and with that, an aspiration to explore life’s spiritual dimension.

We shouldn’t make too much of this. For the labouring classes of husbandmen and villeins, life continued to equate to toil. The demands of persuading the ground to provide enough to eat, and of rendering service to the lord, consumed existence. For those lords, life was certainly easier – and for their princes, easier still – but still uncertain and usually abbreviated. They made war, and played at it in their tournaments; adjudicated on the grievances of their retainers; organized the defence of their realms and plotted to subvert those of their rivals. Their chief sport was to chase and kill animals, a diversion which they pursued with terrific enthusiasm. That life might have a gentler, more contemplative side seems to have occurred to few of them.

But, the Norman order did provide for that side. Through the breach made by the warriors came the monks of Saint Benedict. They had built their great abbeys and accumulated their great estates in Normandy. Now they were invited to do the same in England. It was this engineered monastic revival which caused gardening’s green shoots to show.

I used to know a man – later the editor of a well-known provincial newspaper – who told me in all seriousness that he had investigated a case in which an office worker from Slough had left his home one morning, walked a little way along the road and fallen through an unusual kind of hole into the 14th century. Whether he was lost for ever, or managed to find a way to reascend into our own age, I cannot now recall.

Were I to suffer a similar fate, and had I the choice among the variety of occupations open to men of the Middle Ages, I think I could do worse than be gardinarius in a Benedictine monastery. Brother Thomas I would be, a person of middling status in the monastic hierarchy, unregarded beside the abbot, the prior, the bursar, the precentor and the other major obedientiaries. Doubtless the monks of the scriptorium, with their noses buried in bibles and psalters, would look down on me, with my rough, weathered hands and attendant odour of fish; although they would be grateful enough when executing their illuminations for the dyes derived from the berries and flowers grown under my direction.

Mine would be largely an outdoor life, and a most useful one. I would tend and jealously guard the monastery fishponds, watching over the carp, bream and pike, fattening them up with choice morsels until the feast day came and they were dispatched to the table to provide welcome relief from starch. I would, if there were a river, have an eel fishery; and trap them of a dark night in autumn when the migrating urge is on them, for no flesh of freshwater fish is richer or more tasty. I would have charge of the orchards, prune the apple and pear trees, tend to them at blossom time, gather in the fruit. I would know the way of bees and when to harvest their honey. I would know something of herbs and their ways, although their cultivation and medicinal use would probably be the responsibility of a specialist infirmarius. The sight of my vines would gladden my heart, and the thought of the wine they would provide would warm my spirit through the long hours of devotion and contemplation which the discipline demanded.

The physical well-being of the monastery would depend, in great measure, on me; and productivity and usefulness would surely be my guiding principles. But there would be more to it than that.

The theory of monastic life came from Saint Benedict: ‘None follows the will of his own heart.’ The practice meant a sufficiency of nourishment to sustain life, and little more; ample daily doses of organized communal devotion; a lot of hard work; and, during what was left from a monk’s waking hours, peace, quiet, and a setting conducive to the meditative working of the mind. And they knew, those clever monks, how much more likely the human mind was to turn to the profitable pondering of God’s mysteries if stimulated by God’s work at its most evidently pleasing. Enfolded in the harmony of nature, soothed and delighted by the song of the birds and the rustle of the leaves, caressed by the scents of the flowers and herbs, open to all the associations of the paradise garden, the inner being could soar.

The famous Benedictine monastery blueprint found at St Gall in Switzerland, dating from the 9th century, confirms that the meditative heart of the monastery was the cloister garden, or garth. It was enclosed by one wall of the church, and by the communal buildings, the refectory and the monks’ cells. The church was for observing the liturgy, while the open space of the garden was supposed to encourage the brothers’ souls in private prayer and spiritual wrestling, to raise their vision from this world and its imperfections to the light made available in the Gospels of Christ.

Its ability to promote this influence was, in part, derived from its dominant colour. From the earliest times, green had symbolized rebirth, resurrection, fertility, happiness both temporal and spiritual. Brides in ancient Palestine wore green. The green of the Prophet Mohammed’s cloak and of the banner beneath which he and his followers marched was the green of hope. But it is also the colour of tranquillity and refreshment. Long before modern science was able to establish that it is, indeed, the colour most restful to the eye because of the exactness with which it is focussed on the retina, the phenomenon had been accepted. In the 18th century Addison wrote: ‘The rays that produce in us the idea of green fall upon the eye in such due proportion that they give the animal spirits their proper play.’ A little later, the philosopher David Hartley defined the connection in his Observations on Man: ‘The middle colour of the seven primary ones, and consequently most agreeable to the organ of sight, is also the general colour of the vegetable kingdom.’

The power of the colour was acknowledged by the chroniclers. In the records of the great monastery at Clairvaux, the sick man is seated upon a green lawn (‘sedet aegrotus cespite in viridi’), and ‘for the comfort of his pain all kinds of grass are fragrant in his nostrils … the lovely green of herb and tree nourishes his eyes’. The theme is taken up by Hugh of Fouilloy, who observes how ‘the green turf … refreshes encloistered eyes, and their desire to study returns. It is truly the nature of the colour green that it nourishes the eyes and preserves their vision.’

On this basis – accepting that every visible trace of every medieval monastic garden was long ago expunged, and that no medievalist can know for sure what the physical reality of the monastic garden was – it is a reasonable assumption that it would have contained turf. Grass would have appeared of its own accord; and having done so, would have been approved as a generous, reliable supplier of the beneficence of green. These little patches, around which the cowled brothers shuffled murmuring from the Scriptures, or sat, eyes fixed upon the firmament, were the first lawns.

There is some evidence – a nod here and there among the old books and illustrations – to suggest that cultivated grass was a feature of the handful of pleasure gardens created outside the great ecclesiastical institutions. Henry II’s garden at Clarendon in Wiltshire was said to boast ‘a wealth of lawns’. Under Henry III, turf was laid at the Palace of Westminster, and a herbarium ordered by him at Windsor Castle may well have contained a lawn. A drawing of 1280, now in the British Museum, shows a game of bowls being played on what could be a rudimentarily levelled expanse of grass. A few years earlier, there is a record of a squire of Eleanor of Castile being paid threepence a night to water the turves at Conway Castle.

The date 1260 is honoured among historians who have sought to reassemble the long-buried elements of the medieval garden. In that year a Swabian nobleman turned Dominican friar, Albertus Magnus, Count of Bollstadt, produced the first gardening book, De Vegetabilis. And included in its wisdom – for which the name of Albertus Magnus should be blessed – are instructions for creating a lawn. The noble count counsels that the ground be cleared of weeds, flooded with boiling water and laid with turves which should be beaten down with ‘broad mallets and trodden’; then the grass ‘may spring forth and closely cover the surface like a green cloth’. Those who have explored these recondite places more thoroughly than me – chiefly the late John Harvey, to whose work I am glad to pay tribute – believe that a similar species of pleasure garden, ‘merry with green trees and herbs’, was described a few years earlier by the encyclopaedist Bartholomew De Glanville, much of whose work was subsequently lost.

The digger in the past is mightily cheered by these nuggets. From them, it is clear that a primitive technique for nurturing grass did exist by the early 13th century. Someone had done it, others had copied him, adapting the methods, until a form of knowledge had coalesced to become sufficiently general for an educated man with a self-appointed mission to record the current condition of learning to include it. They are hardly more than names, Albertus and Bartholomew. But the fact that they wrote in Latin made their books as comprehensible in a monastery in East Anglia as in Dalmatia, Swabia or Rome. It is a pleasing fancy that, within the cloisters of Ely or Canterbury, some literate monk, emerging from a session of laborious copying in the scriptorium, might have encountered Brother Thomas the gardinarius (not much of a one for books, as you might gather from his earth-encrusted fingers and communion with carp), and passed on a couple of tips from the Swabian count on how to improve the scruffy condition of the grass in the cloister garth.

Although it is convenient and gratifying to refer to these assorted patches of green as lawns, it is anachronistic and a touch misleading. The Latin word used by Bartholomew is pratum, which is translated in English as ‘mead’, from the Old English medwe. The word ‘lawn’ is derived from the Old French laund, and was not known in the Middle Ages at all. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it made its debut in Thomas Elyot’s dictionary of 1548 – ‘a place voyde of trees, as in a parke or forret’. It retained this meaning, of an open space between trees, in Johnson’s dictionary of 1755, illustrated with lines from Paradise Lost:

Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks

Grazing the tender herb were interposed.

Actually, had the great lexicographer inquired a little more assiduously, he would have found that the word had already been particularized to a degree, being applied to an expanse of grass laid down by design in the vicinity of a house, with the purpose of enhancing its appearance. But, although there are examples of the word being used in that sense quite early in the 18th century – for instance in Miller’s Garden Kalendar of 1733 – the application was far from universal. Indeed, as late as 1833, in The English Gardener, Cobbett refers to such features as ‘grass-plats’. Go back to Johnson, and you find these as ‘grass-plots’, defined as ‘a small level covered with short grass’, and illustrated with a line from Shakeapeare’s Tempest – ‘here on this grass-plot, in this very place, come and sport’.

If we then return to Bartholomew, we find him warbling about his meads ‘y-hight with herb and grass and flowers of diverse kind. And therefore, for fairness and green springing that is within, it is y-said that meads laugheth.’ This, then, is the medieval lawn, not notably kempt, the grass sparkling with daisies, violets, trefoil, speedwell. And having made the leap from the monastery, the concept of grass as something more than a source of food for sheep and cattle took hold in the developing English artistic consciousness. In Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, the good women disported themselves

Upon the small, soft, sweet grass,

that was with flowers sweet embroidered all

of such sweetness and such odour all.

A few years later the unknown author of The Floure and the Leafe carolled in anaemic Chaucerian imitation of a herber

that benched was, and with turves new

freshly turved, whereof the grene gras

so small, so thik, so short, so fresh of hew

that most lyk to grene wol, wot I, it was.

This earthly paradise corresponds with that encountered by the travellers in Boccaccio’s Decameron in the gardens of the Villa Palmieri near Florence – ‘a meadow plot of green grass, powdered with a thousand flowers, set round with orange and cedar trees’.

The historian is properly grateful for these fragments. But, in the absence of any surviving medieval English garden, any detailed description of one, or any comprehensive work of instruction from which to make sound deductions, it is tempting to make much – perhaps too much – of the inherently unreliable evidence presented by poets and painters. This is not to suggest that Chaucer and lesser mortals were engaged in deliberate deceit. But, in general, the purpose of art and literature was not to record the world as it was, but to present a brighter, more beautiful, divinely inspired vision; the world as it might be if God’s creatures abandoned their vicious ways and lived according to his Word (the Canterbury Tales being, in part, the glorious exception).

It is difficult to believe that anyone who read the most popular European poem of the 14th century, Guillaume de Lorus’s Roman de la Rose, can have related the interminable amorous gyrations of its courtly hero to anything happening in their own lives. This was the century of the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Hundred Years’ War. Life was assaulted by the prospect of death by violence or putrefying disease, privation, starvation or social upheaval; and it was understandable that the artistic consciousness should have preferred to dwell in a clean, sweet-smelling, idealized kingdom of the imagination.

This is the setting for the Roman de la Rose, which Chaucer translated from the French. Here, freed from any obligation to engage with life, the courtier could devote himself to the intricacies of love-making, his delicate footsteps directed by the bloodless conventions of courtly love. He progresses, at the speed of a snail, towards his fulfilment, enacted in the centre of a garden in the form of a perfect square, with a fountain at the intersection of its diagonals. The sky is blue, the air warm, the cheeks of the participants untouched by mark of pox, their clothes neat and clean, the birds a-twitter, the trees in blossom, the grass lush and spangled with violets and periwinkles and flowers red and yellow – ‘such plenty there grew never in mead’, Chaucer writes. In the 15th-century illustrations of the poem in the British Museum, we see the courtly company loose in this Eden, prancing around to the strains of harp, oboe and fife-and-drums, beneath their feet a soft carpet of vegetation, their milk-white faces shaded by luxuriant trees.

It is a world of complete make-believe, purged of ugliness. We meet it in Stefan Lockner’s Madonna in the Rose Arbour, in which the grass is studded with daisies, violets, red clover and strawberries; in the Hennesy Book of Hours, where the saints Cosmos and Damian are seated on a turf bench in the middle of a lawn bright with daisies and camomile; in a fresco of Pinturicchio showing Susannah and the Elders against a background of turf and flowers; in the tapestry known as the Lady with the Unicorn, where the lady receives a jewelled necklace from her maid, standing in a flowery mead.

I encountered it on my honeymoon, in the chapel built in Granada to contain the remains of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. It was a Flemish painting of the early 15th century, displaying a fine palace, a garden in which squares of grass are divided by gravel paths, a low wall with peacocks on it, a couple reading under a tree, a knot with spindly trees, a lake with a swan and sloping lawns leading down to it, the grass shorn rather than shaggy.

So medieval man, or our time parachutist, would have found lawns in the imaginary world of poetry, painting and tapestry; and might have encountered a version of the real thing within the great ecclesiastical institutions, and adorning royal pleasure grounds. But to believe a stroll around the countryside would have brought him, sooner or later, to a well-ordered garden containing cultivated grass is probably fanciful. Miles Hadfield, in his History of British Gardening, asserts that gardening as an aesthetic pursuit did not exist in England before the end of the 15th century. He dismisses attempts to cite the walled and trellised gardens of the Roman de la Rose illustrations, arguing that the presence of such exotics as dates, liquorice and zedoary reflects a purely Continental tradition. Energetic medievalists necessarily disagree, maintaining that, with the development of international commerce, Continental influences must have achieved a degree of penetration; and that, anyway, the division between serviceable and aesthetic is false.

To put this argument simplistically, medieval man would have grown his apples and pears to eat or sell them, his leeks and garlic to make soup, his thyme and hyssop and sage to flavour his food and treat his ailments, his vines to make wine. And in the planting and the growing and the harvesting, he would have taken a spiritual pleasure; smiled at the blossom, breathed in the fragrance, felt the fatness of grapes in his hand; and, consciously or unconsciously, he would have found that there was a correlation between the arrangement of his garden and the degree of his pleasure.

It is a truism to observe that the period between the Norman Conquest and the victory of Henry VII on Bosworth Field gave birth to the nation, and hazardous to offer generalizations about national psychology. On the other hand, an attempt has to be made to explain how the aspiration to create order and beauty achieved physical expression. Norman rule freed England from what had been the constant threat of invasion. But it took time for the effects of this liberation to percolate the collective consciousness. The ruling class continued to organize their demesnes on the first principle that they must be resistant to attack. Any garden ordered by the lord for his gratification had, therefore, to be contained within fortified walls. But as time went on, and notions of permanence and stability of a sorts took hold, so was born a new confidence; and, for the first time, the lord considered the possibility of enclosing his lordly dwelling within its grounds, rather than the other way round. Freed at last from the psychic claustrophobia imposed by fear of chaos, the human spirit might take wing and, recalling Eden, create a garden.

With confidence came a mighty economic growth, which the depredations of the wars with France, the astounding population cull of the Black Death, and assorted social upheavals, merely slowed, never halted. Although the great mass of the population remained mired in the unending struggle for survival, significant numbers, inspired by the possibility of self-advancement, rose like bubbles in a dark pond to take their places among the élite. Trade with Continental Europe, particularly in wool and woven cloth, soared. Huge fortunes were made, and required managing and spending. Great men had leisure, as they always had. But now they had more idea what to do with it, though hunting, hawking and playing war games remained their chief outlets.

With wealth came a loosening of the ropes which bound people to their protectors and the places where they were born. No longer did they feel so inclined to share their living quarters with their livestock and toil on soil which was not theirs, for the benefit of remote, grasping landlords. Nor were they edified by the spectacle of privileged prelates and the vast army of lesser clergy feasting on the proceeds of their tithes. As the abbots and bishops and friars exchanged devotion to their vows for ever softer living, so did the reputation of their Church decline. In the great religious houses, even the humble gardinarius would have his servant, and perhaps a dovecote to cluck over, and a dog to take scraps. They were no longer sanctuaries from barbarism, but places of frequently ostentatious luxury, the maintenance of which required endless cadging and knavish tricks.

The new-found social fluidity engendered a spiritual flowering. No longer apprehensive about what the next day might bring, nor owing obeisance to a feudal lord or vainglorious bishop, educated Tudor man looked around him. Settled in his fine house, his lands secure, with cash to spare, he wanted more from life than merely its continuation. Staring from his gabled windows out over his acres, his curiosity stirred. It was time for the first gardening book in English.

Pleasures of the Green

These even and uniform carpets of green velvet, seen through their countryside, which other nations have not been able to obtain for themselves, make an admirable sight. People tried vainly to imitate them in France … the lawns that grow in France are not fine

ANTOINE JOSEPH DEZALLIER D’ARGENVILLE

Actually, that first ‘pleasant treatise’ of Thomas Hill, published in the first year of Elizabeth’s rule, 1558, does not – except for the chronicler searching for serviceable milestones – mark the beginning of anything; and since he has nothing to say about grass beyond the observation that turfed walks provide comfort and delight for the wearied mind, he need not detain us long. The interest of the little book lies not so much in the ragbag of other people’s experience and prejudice drawn together by its energetic compiler, but – as Hadfield points out – as an indicator of a public appetite. Gardening had begun to take root in Tudor England. People wanted to know from Thomas Hill ‘how to dress, sow and set a garden; and what remedies may be had and used against such beasts, worms and flies and such like that annoy gardens’. And they existed in sufficient numbers to make it worth Hill’s time to sift through the assorted tedious teachings of ‘Palladius, Columella, Varro, Pyophanes, learned Cato and many more’, to pick out the nuggets which might be usefully applied in his damp, temperate land, and – in his own word – ‘English’ them.

The first English writer to whom the lawnsman owes a bow of respect is Gervase Markham, whose The English Husbandman of 1613 (later refined and expanded into Cheap and Good Husbandry) made available a coherent programme of action to make best use of English earth. There is charm and sense in Markham’s counsel:

The mixture of colours is the only delight of the eye above all others … as in the composition of a delicate woman, the grace of her cheeks is the mixture of red and white, the wonder of the eye black and white, and the beauty of her hand blue and white, any of which is not said to be beautiful if it consist of single or simple colours; and so in these walks and alleys the all green, nor the all yellow, cannot be said to be the most beautiful, but the green and the yellow (that is the untrod grass and the well-knit gravel) being equally mixed, give the eye lustre and delight beyond all comparison.

The point is well made, in its roundabout fashion.

Markham’s recipe for producing that green to delight the eye is none the less valid for its close resemblance to that advocated by that sound old Swabian, Albertus Magnus. Cleanse the ground of stones and weeds, destroy the roots – in how many manuals of lawn care have those arduous principles been recycled? Gervase Markham (or Albertus) was there first. Boiling water should be poured all over, he says; then the floor beaten ‘and trodden mightily’. Place ‘turfs of earth full of green grass, the bare earth turned upwards’, then ‘dance upon with the feet’ until the grass ‘may begin to peep up and put forth small hairs … until finally it is made the sporting green plot for ladies and gentlemen to recreate their spirits in’. Hats off and raised spades to Gervase Markham, for even now one could do worse! And how pleasant is the picture of those Jacobean enthusiasts capering upon their upturned turves, and reaping their reward a year or two later, as they stroll forth with their ladies across the soft grass, stopping to play chess or ‘recreate their spirits’ with some verses of Spenser.

How extensively Markham’s advice was observed, we cannot tell. What we do know is that, by his time, it had become common for aristocrats and plutocrats to commission bowling greens in their grounds, as well as turfed and gravelled walks. By the early 17th century the game of bowls was already secure in the affections of all levels of society. Indeed, Richard II had banned it on the grounds that it was distracting the people from archery, and a Frenchman was never going to be downed by a flying bowl. The prohibition was renewed by Henry IV and Edward IV, and re-imposed by Henry VIII, who declared: ‘The game of bowls is an evil because the alleys are in operation in conjunction with saloons or dissolute places … a vicious form of gambling’. Innkeepers were threatened with a fine of two pounds for permitting the game to be played. But – perhaps because Henry himself was known to be a keen and accomplished player – little attention seems to have been paid, and bowls continued to flourish.

In medieval times, it was generally played on flattened cinders or clay. But by 1600, grass had become the preferred surface for the nobility and gentry (although it is thought likely that Drake played his immortal game on an expanse of camomile). An elementary science of grass culture must have evolved, too; the greens must have been as flat as they could make them, and the grass as short and thick and even as they could get it. By 1670 the rules of bowls had been formalized, and a few years later Randle Holme wrote in the Academy of Armory that ‘bowling greens are open wide spaces made smooth and even … orders agreed by gentlemen bowlers that noe high heeles enter for spoiling their green, they forfeit sixpence’.

We can only speculate whether similar standards of care were translated to the ornamental grass plot; whether the Elizabethans and Jacobeans cared if it were flat or bumpy, whether they liked flowers and herbs intermingled, how often they cut and rolled, and how. In the absence of any surviving garden of the period, we again have to rely upon the ancient texts and illustrations, in which – regrettably – the attention paid to grass and its cultivation is at best fleeting, and at worst non-existent. If we wish, we can learn a good deal about their affection for the intricacies of the knot and the maze, and the eagerness with which they seized upon the fruits of exploration and commerce – not just the potato, but cedars, laburnums, tulips, yuccas, Jerusalem artichokes, oranges, lemons, cherries and a host of new flowers and shrubs. England was more prosperous than it had ever been, and more stable – until the Civil War – than any country in Europe had ever been. Men were inspired by the questing spirit, and gardening’s experimental, organic character made it a natural outlet. Sadly but understandably, that spirit was rarely exercised by the matter of grass. There was, however, one notable exception.

The authentic voice of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England is that of Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans, one of the numerous distinctions of whose life was that it was ended by a chill caught while he was stuffing a dead fowl with snow to observe the effect of cold on the preservation of flesh. It is characteristic of the elasticity of Bacon’s mind that, in the midst of half a lifetime’s unscrupulous and serpentine manoeuvrings at court – whose sole guiding principle was the promotion of his own interests – he should have published his Essays, or Counsell Civill and Morall, which amounted to a manual of spiritual and cultural self-improvement. The range of these homilies, the richness of the learning they display, and the elegance of their prose, are amazing. But equally remarkable is the tone, its authority and confidence. Whether in routing the atheists, measuring the usefulness of novelties, or analysing the fruits of friendship, this supreme know-all is immune to the very notion of uncertainty.

Bacon’s intellectual arrogance is on magnificent display in his famous essay ‘Of Gardens’. In considering the garden, he does not stoop to concern himself with anything so mundane as the growing of things. His mind is on the moral dimension. The garden is, he asserts, ‘the purest of human pleasures … the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man’. ‘When ages grow to civility and elegance, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely as if gardening were the greater perfection.’ The regulations are set out with impregnable assurance. Bacon scorns knots with ‘diverse coloured earths’ as toys. Images cut in juniper or ‘other garden stuff’ are for children. Aviaries are impermissible. Pools ‘marr all and make the garden unwholesome and full of frogs and flies’. The main garden must be square, surrounded by a ‘stately arched hedge’, with turrets above the arches to contain bird-cages. At each end of the side gardens there should be a mound, breast high; and at the centre of the whole thing, another, thirty feet high, with three ascents, each broad enough for four to walk abreast; and within the hedged alleys should be gravelled walks (not grass, which would be ‘going wet’).

Bacon’s ideal Eden in St Albans – it’s difficult to imagine him or anyone else actually creating and maintaining such an exorbitance – covered thirty acres. There were three essential elements: at the far end, a natural wilderness devoid of trees but rampant with thickets of sweet briar and honeysuckle; in the middle, the main garden; at the entrance, the green. Here is our first true English lawn:

The green hath two pleasures, the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge which is to enclose the garden.

That is all. There is no hint as to how the precept is to be realized. The fount of wisdom does not dirty his hands with practical tips. For those we must consult our plodding friend, Gervase Markham. And in any case, it seems most improbable that this four acres of perfect turf ever existed outside Bacon’s imagination. That is not the point. The significance of Bacon’s essay on gardens lies, not in any practical application, but in the fact that he wrote it. It proves that, by the turn of the 16th century, the cultured Englishman’s apprehension of how to express himself included the concept of the decorative garden, and that an expanse of cultivated grass was fundamental to that concept. By and large, it has remained so ever since. And as Englishmen took ever greater pride in their Englishness, developing as a national pastime the habit of comparing themselves favourably to foreigners, so did they learn to see grass, not merely as a contributor to the beauty and harmony of the pleasure garden but, as of itself, another symbol and symptom of English superiority.

Sir Henry Wooton, diplomat, Provost of Eton, angler, scholar, poet, spent most of his adult life serving his country’s interests in the capitals of Europe. He studied our neighbours closely, learned their languages, became familiar with their habits, and concluded, with that quiet, unassailable certitude which over the centuries so impressed and irritated those who encountered it: ‘In our own country there is a delicate and diligent curiosity surely without parallel among foreign nations.’ Another eminent and complacent polymath, Sir William Temple, identified evidence of that divinely bestowed pre-eminence:

Besides the temper of our climate, there are two things particular to us that contribute much to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf … which cannot be found in France or Holland as we have it, the soil not admitting that fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that greenness in France …

Pepys subscribed wholeheartedly to what had clearly become a general assumption: ‘We have the best gravel walks in the world, France having none nor Italy; and the green of our bowling alleys is better than any they have.’

Is it any wonder that, meeting such impregnable smugness, visitors from continental Europe should have been moved to occasional outbursts against English arrogance? The paradox – one might say the hypocrisy – of this island pride is that it should have been accompanied by an extremely enlightened openness to Continental influence; an eagerness to purloin, adapt and improve upon the discoveries of others, and then pass them off as Anglo-Saxon inspirations. The extent to which post-Restoration garden design in England was shaped by, even copied from, the example realized with such overpowering magnificence in France is a matter hotly and inconclusively debated by the historians. The prosecution case is persuasive, resting as it does on the certain facts that, as a cousin of Louis XIV and a frequent visitor to his court during the years of exile, Charles II must have observed the unfolding in the Tuileries of André Le Nôtre’s grandiose geometric vision of a royal garden; that, on becoming king, Charles asked his cousin if he might borrow Le Nôtre, then engaged at Fontainebleau; that, although Le Nôtre probably never came, his precepts were put into practice at St James’s Park by André Mollet, whose father had worked with Le Nôtre.

The French tradition was founded on a delight in, and dependence on, geometric patterns. The lines are drawn by channels of water, by hedges and avenues of trees, by paths – all of undeviating straightness. Within the angles of intersection are arranged in symmetrical harmony all manner of attractions: fountains, flower beds, arbours, pools, grass plots and so on. All are where they are according to a grand design. For the first time, the garden becomes an overt statement of Man’s ambition and ability to control the world around him and make it reflect his image. In the case of the gardens of the Sun King, it may well be that what seems to us now their chilly and regimented splendour was the projection of the proprietor rather than their designer. But since neither Louis nor Le Nôtre – nor indeed, I’m sorry to say, King Charles – evinced any interest in the cultivation of grass, we need not dwell on their ambitions.

Others were more enlightened, and inclined to resist the French model. John Worlidge, in his Art of Gardening (1677) bemoaned the influence of the ‘new, useless and unpleasant mode’, denounced the banishment of ‘garden flowers, the miracles of nature’, contending that the French system of gravel walks and grass plots was fit for kings and princes only. He celebrated the delight taken in their gardens by Englishmen of all classes, the noble in his country seat, the shopkeeper with his ‘boxes, pots and other receptacles, plants etc.’, the cottage dweller with his ‘proportionable garden’.

Worlidge was an early pragmatist. Far removed from court circles, free from any need to fawn and flatter, he knew perfectly well that the vast spread of Versailles with its armies of gardeners was no sort of an example for an Englishman. For him gardening’s proper companion was common sense rather than high ambition. His approach – and that of his equally sensible contemporary, John Rea – was severely practical. Rea’s Flora of 1665 honoured on an epic scale the glories of flower, plant and fruit (the fashionable delight in patterns of grass and gravel, to the exclusion of all else, he damned as ‘an immoral nothing’).

Buried within its mass of instruction is some scanty advice about laying turf with a turfing iron, and disciplining it with a ‘heavy, broad Beater’. Rea’s tips echo those in the other influential guide of the time, John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense. Evelyn is remembered these days, if at all, for his voluminous diary which was discovered in an old clothes basket at his home more than a hundred years after his death. In his time he was famed as the first great advocate of tree planting, and a dispenser of generally sound, if exceedingly wordy, gardening lore. He tells the lawnsman that in October ‘it will now be good to beat, roll and mow … for the ground is supple and it will even all inequalities’.

It is improbable that a rich landowner such as Evelyn, or literate gentlemen such as Rea and Worlidge, would have done anything more strenuous in their gardens than giving the orders; so perhaps we should excuse their reticence on technical matters, annoying though it is. Beating was done with a mallet, rolling with a roller not materially different from our own. Mowing deserves a closer look.

The word is Old English, the science as ancient as the most ancient Egyptians, who used a sickle adapted from an animal’s jawbone to harvest their corn. The Romans used a one-handed implement and stooped to cut. But the Englishman of the Middle Ages preferred to stand up straight, wielding a scythe almost as long as himself. It had two handles attached to its slightly curved willow snead, and a long blade of soft metal at right angles, which was sharpened with a block of sandstone.

Efficient scything demanded – beyond the stamina to keeping swinging through the long days of harvest-time – precision, dexterity and a harmony between man, his tool and his task. Until the machine age consigned him to redundancy, the scytheman was highly valued, and there was a romantic appeal to him and his labour. His oneness with landscape excited writers seeking to distil its essence; most notably Tolstoy, who devoted a memorable passage in Anna Karenina to Levin’s spiritual flight into the boundless golden cornfields, where – scythe in hand – he mixed his sweat with that of the serfs as he tasted again the old bond with Mother Earth.

On a more modest scale, the poet Andrew Marvell explored the metaphorical possibilities:

I am the mower, Damon, known

Through all the meadows I have mown.

Despite presumably well-paid work and a healthy outdoor way of life, Damon is not happy. Love, of course, has made him so:

Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was

And wither’d like his Hopes the Grass.

Marvell makes play with his conceit:

… she

What I do to the grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

The poem reaches an absurd climax, as:

The edged Stele by careless chance

Did into his Ankle glance.

The physical hurt Damon repairs, with ‘Shepherd’s-purse and Clowns-all-heal’. But there is a deeper cut, for which no cure this side of the grave can heal:

Til death has done that this must do,

For Death, thou art a Mower too.

Marvell’s lines –

While thus he threw his Elbow round,

Depopulating all the ground,

And, with his whistling scythe does cut

Each stroke between the Earth and Root

– are the closest to a description of 17th-century scything that I have been able to discover; and, of course, refer to corn and meadow grass rather than anyone’s grass plot. Clues about the tending of these are provided in a collection of drawings of garden tools executed by Evelyn to illustrate what was to have been his life’s crowning work, his Elysium Britannicum, a survey of his native land and its achievements envisaged on such a massive scale that his energies were exhausted before it had advanced much beyond the planning stage. These include a group of implements for the lawn: a turf-lifter, a turf-edger and a scythe.

We must assume that this was how it was done. That it was done, that by the end of the 17th century the cultivation of fine grass in the form of bowling green or ornamental lawn had become general practice in the gardens of the great and the rich, is given some circumstantial weight by the accounts of that endlessly curious and untiring traveller, Celia Fiennes. In Mrs Stevens’s ‘neat gardens’ at Epsom, she found six grass walks guarded by dwarf fruit trees; at Durdans in Surrey ‘three long grass walks which are also very broad’; at Woburn a large bowling green with eight arbours, and a seat in a high tree where she sat and ate ‘a great quantity of the Red Carolina gooseberry’. Visiting New College, Oxford, in 1694, Miss Fiennes much admired a great mound ‘ascended by degrees in a round of green paths’, and noted a bowling green.

Thirty years later the celebrated Oxford antiquarian Thomas Hearne lamented the rage for lawns. He noted sourly in his journal the destruction of the ‘fine, pleasant garden’ at Brasenose ‘purely to turn it into a grass plot and erect some silly statue there’. As early as the 1670s, Christchurch, richest and grandest of the Oxford colleges, had enclosed a smooth, green lawn intersected by gravel paths, and reached by a noble flight of baroque steps. The fellows of Pembroke had their bowling green, while at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton’s feet trod soft turf as his mind wrestled with the mysteries of gravitational pull and refrangibility.

It would be absurd to pretend that the gardeners of the later Stuart period were at all excited by the subject of grass culture – or, I suppose, to suggest that the real gardeners of any period have been. Thus, despite Sir William Temple’s already quoted tribute to English turf, it does not figure in his long, lyrical description of the garden at Moor Park where he spent his honeymoon in 1655: the ‘perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw’, with its gravelled terrace running along the house, its three flights of steps down to a rectangular parterre quartered by gravel walks and bounded by cloisters, its grotto, fountains, statues, summer house, abundance of fruit trees and marked absence of flowers. The gardens of the Russells at Woburn at least boasted that bowling green. But it was the flower and vegetable gardens, and particularly the orchards (in 1674 fifteen different species of plum and twelve of pear were planted) which received the attention of the head gardener, John Field.

Passion was excited by the great advances in the science of botany and the ever-increasing availability of new plants. That ardour for the new triggered by pioneers such as the Tradescants, father and son, had enormously expanded the horticultural horizon. But on the whole, the grandees who commissioned the great gardens were not that exercised by subtle distinctions between varieties of gillyflower or nasturtium (although tulips, notoriously, were another matter). They were more inclined to involve themselves in novelties such as statuary and hydraulic engineering, and, in particular, topiary. The new king and queen, William and Mary, had brought with them from Holland their fondness for evergreen hedges and bushes, which clamoured for some artist with a pair of shears to work them into a resemblance of a camel or a griffin or some other diverting shape.

The desire common to the great men, of course, was that their trappings – including their gardens – should reflect and display their greatness. As is the way with the species, whatever image of greatness one great man presented to the world, another would seek to surpass it. Few strove harder, at greater expense and with more magnificent if ridiculous results, than James Brydges, successively Lord Chandos, Earl of Carnarvon, Viscount Wilton and Duke of Chandos, whose name is perpetuated in the series of anthems written in his honour by Handel.

The man who thought nothing of commissioning the greatest composer of the age to sing his praises had a home to match his estimation of his own importance, and gardens in proportion. The main parterre at Canons in Middlesex was studded with life-size statues, most prominent among them a gladiator who stood beside a canal fed with water piped from springs at Stanmore two miles away. The divisions of the parterre, most unusually, were of decorative ironwork. Vegetables were grown under beehives of glass. At the end of each of the eight intersecting alleys was a lodging for a retired army sergeant who, together, formed a guard for the place. There were flamingos, ostriches and blue macaws, and eagles which drank from stone basins. Tortoises from Majorca crept through the undergrowth, in little danger of straying outside the boundaries of an estate each of whose main avenues of trees was more than half a mile long. And there was turf at Canons, grown from seed imported, for reasons which remain obscure, from Aleppo. It must have thrived and been extensive, for when Chandos’s fortunes were at their zenith, it was scythed three times a week and weeded daily.

Miles Hadfield suggests a close correspondence between the layout of the gardens at Canons and an influential book entitled The Theory and Practice of Gardening, first published in 1713 under the name John James, for many years Clerk to the Works at Greenwich. This was, in fact, a fairly close translation of a work by a Parisian, Antoine Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville, who had studied with a pupil of the great Le Nôtre, and was, therefore, a textbook for an essentially French school of design.

To be honest, there is little pleasure to be had from studying The Theory and Practice today. It is as short on charm and humour as Hillard and Botting’s First Latin Primer. But one can understand why John James’s cluster of aristocratic subscribers were so taken with it. It presents, not reflections or suggestions or philosophical aspirations, but prescriptions, precisely plotted and illustrated with encyclopaedic thoroughness. There are pages and pages of elaborate designs to choose from, which offer – or appear to – a guarantee of success. At the same time, the book does have, in its pedagogic fashion, dirty fingers. The nobleman, desirous of stamping the reflection of his nobility on his domain, might select a suitable rectangular plan. His head gardener, assuming he could read, could then learn how to put it all into practice. No one before had made available such a reliable, all-encompassing code of gardening conduct.

Anyone interested in the evolution of the lawn and grass culture has particular reason to be grateful to Mr James of Greenwich, for he tackles the subject with great thoroughness – or, perhaps, one should say that D’Argenville does. But, curiously enough, while the main design fundamentals expounded in The Theory and Practice are undoubtedly French in origin and inspiration, the section dealing with grass is not. D’Argenville graciously concedes the case:

You cannot do better than follow the method used in England, where their grass plots are of so exquisite a beauty that in France we can scarcely hope to come up with it.

The essence of the overall doctrine is what James calls ‘contrariety’ – the ‘placing and distributing the several parts of the garden always to oppose them one to the other’. It would be tedious to delve into the detail of its application. Suffice to say that the importance of turf is properly recognized. ‘A bowling green’, James reflects, ‘is one of the most agreeable compartments of a garden and when ’tis rightly placed, nothing is more pleasant to the eye.’ It demands, he adds, ‘a beautiful carpet of turf very smooth and of a lovely green’. He proceeds to a succession of alternative plans, each presented with immense care. In one, the square of the green is edged in box and pierced with a star of paths, with a rounded hollow at the centre. Another is oval, ‘cut in Carts to make a diversity’. There is a Great Bowling Green, ‘adorned with a Buffet of Water made against the slope’; and an even greater one with compartments ‘cut and tied together by Knots and Cartoozes of Embroidery, very delicate’.

In the Jamesian garden, the principal feature is the parterre (French, derived from the Latin partire, to divide), which was regularly shaped, usually edged in box, and intricately designed in patterns of gravel, sand, box, flowers, shrubs, trees or grass. The grass parterre was known as the ‘parterre à l’Angloise’, and should, according to the master, ‘consist only of large grass plots all of a piece, or cut but little’.

These days the exemplars on which the Frenchman and his English disciple lavished such care are no more than historical curiosities; symptoms of a preoccupation with orderliness and control which seems almost obsessive. But John James’s instructions on how to get things to grow contained many of the eternal truths. All subsequent manuals on creating a lawn – up to and including those of our own Doctor Hessayon – elaborate on the principles laid down almost three hundred years ago. The ground should be dry, broken up, the stones raked and removed. A ‘good mold’ should be thrown on. Flat ground should be seeded, slopes turfed. The seed should be sown very thickly, then raked in. ‘Chuse a mild day rather inclined to wet,’ says The Theory and Practice, ‘that the rain, forcing down the earth and sinking the seed, may cause it to shoot up the sooner. Do it in autumn rather than spring which can require continual waterings which is a very great slavery and expense.’

These are, quite simply, the immutable fundamentals of making a lawn. Nor is the master any less sound on the pitfalls. ‘All the difficulty of making a fine green plot by sowing has in getting good seed.’ He delivers a stern warning: ‘You should not do, as many, that will gather their seed from some hayloft and sow it without distinction … the seed shooting too high, making large stalks, the lower part remains naked and bare, and mow it as often as you will it will never make handsome grass.’ James is vague on where you should obtain your seed; understandably, since a century and a half later gardening writers were still bemoaning the difficulty in finding decent seed. Turf, he says, should be taken from road sides or from the edges of pastures and meadows where cows and sheep feed.

Regrettably, the Jamesian advice on maintaining grass is somewhat skimpy. Beat it when it gets too high, roll it with ‘great cylinders or rolls of wood or stone’, and mow it ‘at least once a month’. These are the rules, and there is nothing wrong with them. But suspicions stir when the master proclaims: ‘It ought to be so close and even that no one blade should exceed another.’ Here, he succumbs to the proclivity of experts through the ages: for setting a completely unachievable target as if it were the easiest thing in the world, and intimating that it is merely our inadequacy or inattention which prevents us from emulating them. I would have enjoyed witnessing John James’s technique with the scythe, checking the condition of his sward, and perhaps pointing out to him that the occasional blade was a few millimetres at variance with its neighbour.

The last edition of John James’s book was published in 1743. By then fashion had moved on at a gallop. The design of gardens had become absorbed into a new cultural landscape and had become an issue for dispute. A generation of controversialists had come of age, thriving on the mockery and demolition of the traditions and tastes it had inherited. By 1743 the Duke of Chandos’s monumental extravagance at Canons had mouldered into something approaching disrepair, His Grace’s exchequer having been ruinously depleted by unsuccessful speculation (he died a year later, to be succeeded by his son Henry, who is reputed to have purchased one of his wives from an ostler as he was passing through Newbury). In a historical context, the more ludicrous aspects of the Duke’s folie de grandeur, and the reaction to them, can be seen as marking a turning point.

But the fact that John James and his publishers considered it worthwhile to issue a new edition of The Theory and Practice thirty years after the first illuminates a rather inconvenient aspect of gardening in Britain. For obvious reasons, historians seek to identify, within whatever great or trivial subject they are tackling, climacterics which can justify those satisfying words: ‘It was the end of an era.’ But in concentrating on the innovations of the innovators, the proclamations and passings of the prophets, it is easy to overlook the extreme slowness with which many changes in taste take hold. This characteristic is particularly pronounced in gardening, because of the gap between concept and realization, dictated by the speed at which plants mature.

Thus, long after the start of what the history books tell us was a new age in English gardening, ordinary Englishmen were still turning to John James to find out what they should be doing with their patch of land. They are forgotten, and in almost all cases the evidence of what they did with their gardens has been expunged. But they – the great majority among the tiny minority of the population who made gardens – continued to pay more attention to the precepts laid down in The Theory and Practice than to anything being trumpeted forth by the new pioneers.

However, it seems improbable that John James’s blueprints were duplicated across the land. Gardeners then would have done what gardeners of all ages do. They would have taken what was useful to them, what interested them and was applicable to their circumstances, financial as well as geographical; and ignored the rest. They would have learned through their own trial and error what in his theory and practice suited them. And if, having invested their time and money and love, they had discovered that the garden they had made had gone out of fashion, would they have hastened to dig it all up and start again?

Shaven Lawns and Vapid Greens

Grass is hard and lumpy and damp and full of dreadful black insects

OSCAR WILDE

During the 18th century, in reaction to principles of garden design imported from France, and under a Royal Family borrowed from Germany, a native, truly English style of marrying a house with its surroundings was born and came of age. Its apostles and disciples left an imprint on the land which endures in a recognizable form to the present day. They also stamped an impression on the national consciousness, a notion of Englishness, which took a powerful hold. I cannot claim that cultivated grass was a dominant motif; these men’s minds were set on higher things. But grass, its texture, its colour, and its convenience, did become an indispensable element of the great Georgian garden. They did not think a great deal of it. But they found that that they could not do without it.

The new movement was, of course, invented by and largely confined to a minute sliver atop society’s heap. The great illiterate mass of the population continued to do what they had always done with whatever land they had: to exploit it for dietary and medicinal purposes, and take delight in commonly available flowers and other plants. What we think of as the Georgian Garden was funded by a handful of enlightened aristocrats, executed by a few artists of taste and education who had a living to earn, and publicized by a crew of poets and prose writers accidentally infected by the passion.

The watchword of these arbiters of taste was ‘Nature’. They looked at the rigid lines, the geometric patterns, the dry symmetries so beloved of the preceding generation, and recoiled. They studied the hedges and trees shaped by sharp shears into quadrilateral figures or fabulous animals, and laughed. In the first famous broadside, delivered in the pages of the Spectator in 1712, Addison wrote: ‘Our British gardeners, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush.’

What they meant by Nature had very little to do with the dark, tangled forests and dreary wastes of bog and rock which had been the natural condition of Britain until man got to work on it. They feared the savagery of the wilderness as much as their distant and immediate ancestors had. Their endeavour, in Pope’s famous words, was to

Consult the genius of the place in all.

The genius of that resonant sentiment is that it was capable of almost any interpretation. It licensed Lord Burlington to annihilate topiary, parterres, knots and gravel paths, and put in their place temples and obelisks copied from the monuments in the gardens of the Villa Borghese and Villa Aldobrandini which he had seen on his Grand Tour. It gave the nod of approval to the Temple of the Four Winds which Vanbrugh deposited on a windswept elevation at Castle Howard in Yorkshire; to the Merlin’s Cave which Kent hid in the grounds of Richmond Palace; to Charles Bridgeman’s amphitheatre at Claremont; to almost anything which aped the classical and proceeded in other than straight lines.

Pope expressed his philosophy more completely in Windsor Forest:

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,

Here earth and water seem to strive again,

Not chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d,

But, as the world, harmoniously confused.

The antithesis between ‘not chaos-like … but harmoniously confused’ is clever. It clears the way for Man to pursue the dictates of his imagination: the sole source – in the absence of direct divine involvement – of the harmony which can quieten pandemonium.

The mind of the little poet was as devious as the celebrated garden he created for himself beside the Thames at Twickenham, where he realized his own vision of beauty. Here, Pope would stroll from his grotto past his temple of shells along a grove of lime trees, pause awhile on the soft turf of his bowling green, inspect the obelisk put up in memory of his mother, inhale the scents of his orangery and finally seat himself in his garden house, where, enclosed by harmonious confusion, he would consider which of the innumerable targets of his vindictive disdain he would ridicule that fine day.

Pope seems to have been a genuinely dedicated and expert gardener. Bridgeman worked with him at Twickenham. Burlington was his friend. William Kent, the instrument of Burlington’s Palladian ambitions, may have lent a hand. When Pope proclaimed a view of what men of taste should be doing with their money, men of taste listened. When he put the boot into those he decreed were without taste, his victims and their schemes were derided. This he did to Chandos and his folly at Canons:

His gardens next your admiration call,

On any side you look, behold the wall!

No pleasing intricacies intervene,

No artful wildness to perplex the scene;

Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,

And half the platform just reflects the other.

One can sense the stunted draper’s son, his pen mightier than any purse, almost hopping with delight as each dart is dispatched; and imagine His Grace, hopping in pain and shame as they land, all his wealth and influence counting for naught.

Pope’s pleasure in the science and art of gardening, and his eagerness to advertise his opinions on aesthetic sensibility, make him much cherished by gardening historians. He is seen as bringing down the curtain on the sterile excesses of the recent past, and raising it to reveal the new domain of the landscape architect. His own garden extended over no more than five acres. But his imagination helped shape much grander ambitions – among them Burlington’s recreation in Chiswick of the sunlit, temple-strewn classical landscapes of Poussin and Claude Lorrain. It created that stage for William Kent, who – in Horace Walpole’s phrase – ‘leaped the fence and saw that all Nature was a garden’.

Kent and his noble patron had no interest in gardening from the point of view of growing things. To them the creation of the garden was a species of architecture, its purpose to realize the classical paradise. At Chiswick, the focus was on the temples and pavilions, copied from designs by Palladio, each deposited on its own eminence, to be approached by its attendant alleys. Shrubs and flower beds were distractions. What mattered was the scene. Its permitted elements were buildings, clipped hedges, standings of trees, lawns and water, as often as not surmounted by the sort of old bridge Lars Porsena of Clusium is remembered for.

All this was very fine if you happened to be an idle earl with an obsession with Italianate landscapes and a bottomless exchequer; or, indeed, a poet with clear notions of beauty and a prime site in a select London suburb to realize them. But lesser men – of substance, but without an original idea about gardening in their heads – needed practical instruction. They were not for leaping fences and embracing Nature. They had some land, and limited budgets, and they wished to know how to get the best out of both. They may well have studied John James, or – if touched by intimations of changing fashion – either Stephen Switzer’s The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener’s Recreation (first published in 1715) or Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening (1728).

These dusty old volumes are useful to the chronicler, as reflections of the tastes of the age. But it would be idle to pretend that either could be read today for profit or amusement. Langley’s is considerably the more tedious, a Georgian equivalent to the collected works of Doctor Hessayon, without the jokes. Both Langley and Switzer adopted, to limited degrees, the new attitudes; Langley in his disapproval of topiary and ornate parterres, Switzer in his espousal of the ‘twistings and twinings of Nature’s lines’. And both showed a proper appreciation of the importance of cultivated grass. ‘The grand front of a building should be open upon an elegant lawn or plain of grass,’ instructs Langley. It should have no borders cut into it, ‘for the grandeur of those beautiful carpets consists in their native plainness’. It should be adorned with beautiful statues, he says, and ‘terminated in its sides’ with groves. A great range of suitable classical notabilities is recommended, among them Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Apollo, the Nine Muses, Priapus, Bellona, Pytho and Vesta. But on how to produce the ‘beautiful carpet’ to show off the gods and goddesses to best advantage, he is largely silent.

Switzer is slightly more helpful. His tips are borrowed from John James: plenty of mould ‘to keep an agreeable verdure upon all your carpet walks’, plenty of ‘rowling, mowing and cleansing’ to keep the ‘daisies, plantains, mouse-ear and other large growing herbs at bay’. He advises that the seed should be chosen from those pastures where the grass is ‘naturally fine and clear’ – wherever they may be found – ‘otherwise you will entail a prodigious trouble on the keeping of Spiry and Benty Grass, as we commonly call it, which cuts extremely bad and scarcely ever looks handsome’.

We have little idea how much attention was paid to these exhortations. Switzer’s and Langley’s books sold well, going through numerous editions. One or other, or both, must have been found on the shelves of a goodly proportion of the country houses which, with their surrounding parks, were sprouting across the land. We know from the correspondence between William Shenstone – who created one of the most celebrated gardens of the age at his home, The Leasowes, near Birmingham – and his friend Lady Luxborough, that he lent her Langley’s book. And we may guess that she derived some benefit from it when she set about beautifying the surroundings of the house to which she had been banished by her husband for allegedly immoral behaviour. In 1749 she tells Shenstone that she has stripped the upper garden of its gravel, and sown it with grass. By June it is ‘tolerable green’, but she is puzzled as to how to keep off ‘beasts of all kinds, those in human shape chiefly’.

Shenstone himself was a curiosity: a minor poet, whose lyrics, in Johnson’s words, ‘trip lightly and nimbly along, without the load of any weighty meaning’; a large, clumsy, melancholic man driven by a consuming passion for his garden. The Leasowes was much visited, much admired, much described. The house, which was so neglected that the rain came straight through the roof, stood on a lawn bounded by a shrubbery and a ha-ha. Falling from it was a tangle of dingles, thick with shrubs and unkempt trees, enclosing little waterfalls and pools, cut by dark, twisting paths, and studded with a total of thirty-nine seats, on each of which the wanderer might rest and contemplate a view whose particularities were not duplicated from any other.

Johnson, standing in judgement as ever, wondered if such a creation required any great powers of mind. ‘Perhaps a sullen and surly speculator,’ he concludes, ‘may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason.’

Maybe; and it is true that Shenstone ruined himself in the pursuit of his vision, and that its realization was extinguished on his death, since his family had to sell the place to pay his debts. But it is also true that his ponderings on’ the matter of what man might do with his surroundings bore fruit:

Yon stream that wanders down the dale,

The spiral wood, the winding vale

The path which, wrought with hidden skill,

Slow-twining scales yon distant hill,

With fir invested – all combine

To recommend the waving line

The verse may be insipid, but the sentiment is sound. The same may be said of many of the impressions and fancies collected in Shenstone’s Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening. He was no great enthusiast for cultivated grass – ‘a series of lawns, though ever so beautiful, may satiate and cloy unless the eye pass to them from wilder scenes’. His focus was on the relationship of Art and Nature. Addison had asserted that the value of a garden as a work of art was determined by the degree of its resemblance to nature. Shenstone had more sense. He separated the two: ‘Apparent art, in its proper province, is always as important as apparent nature. They contrast agreeably; but their provinces ever should be kept distinct.’

All this wrestling with the moral dimension of Man’s responsibilities to the world given him by God may seem rather mystifying now, and most of its abundant harvest in the forms of prose and poetry lies at rest in dusty obscurity. Horace Walpole, another of those dimly remembered shadows of 18th-century literature, surveyed the age in his ‘Essay on Modern Gardening’. He identified Charles Bridgeman, who died in 1738, as the first designer to escape from the tyranny of geometry; and credited him (wrongly, as it had already featured in John James’s book) with the idea of the ha-ha, the sunken wall or ditch which physically separated the garden in front of the great house from the rest of the park, or the countryside beyond, without interrupting the progress of the eye across the scene. For Walpole, Kent was the hero of the age, a status in no way diminished by the fact that he was an architect and painter who worked with landscape, and had no evident interest in horticulture.

Walpole outlived both Kent and the man he nominated as Kent’s successor, Capability Brown. Brown had ‘set up with a few ideas of Kent’, presumably acquired when both men were employed by Lord Cobham at Stowe. With Brown came a great deal more grass. Under his direction, it spread over the walls and terraces, devouring beds and shrubberies, to the very walls and doors of the mansion; so close that someone complained that the cattle could wander inside. This is not the place to grapple with the hotly debated issue of Brown’s contribution to landscape gardening: whether he was a genius whose famous concern for the capabilities enabled him to create a series of uniquely English masterpieces for his aristocratic patrons; or a barbarian who laid waste to the varied inheritance of the past in order to slap on his own bland formula of lake, lawn and tree clump. Brown’s guiding principle was that beauty must be founded on stability and harmony, and that these indispensables were most reliably achieved through fluent, easy lines, gentle convexities and concavities. Whether consciously or not, he echoed the creed expounded by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Smoothness, wrote Burke, is a ‘quality so essential to beauty that I do not recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth’. To support this fantastic assertion, he instances the shape and texture of leaves, of mounds in gardens, of streams, of the surface of furniture, of the skin of women. ‘Most people’, Burke contends, ‘have observed the sort of sense they have had of being swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf with gradual ascents and declivities. This will give a better idea of the beautiful, and point out its probable cause, than almost anything else.’

Nonsense this may well be; but the notion was embraced with enthusiasm in the second half of the 18th century, and it sustained the development of the lawn as the essential canvas of the landscape garden. Capability Brown’s most voluble apologist, the Reverend William Mason, composed a long and unreadable poem, ‘The English Garden’, glorifying among much else the master’s deployment of the ha-ha, which

… divides

Yet seems not to divide the shaven lawn

And parts it from the pasture; for if there

Sheep feed, or dappled deer, their wandering teeth

Will, smoothly as the scythe, the herbage shave,

And leave a kindred verdure.

The Arcadian idyll pictured in Mason’s leaden verses achieves a glimmering of reality in a series of paintings of Sir Thomas Lee’s seat, Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, which were executed by a Spaniard, Balthasar Nebot, in the late 1730s, and may now be seen at the county museum in Aylesbury. They illustrate neatly the manner in which new fashion was often grafted on to, rather than replaced, what was inherited. The elaborate topiary, grown to extraordinary heights during the previous half century, is retained. Sculpted heads in yew stand proud over sharp-edged walls of green. But instead of regarding the old rectangular parterres, they stare out over a medley of temples, statues and other cheerful stonework commissioned from James Gibb to brighten the place up.

The avenues between the high hedges are mostly of grass, as smooth as cloth. While the quality – ladies in billowing dresses with caps on their heads, gentlemen in wigs, short coats, breeches and silk stockings – stand around, the labourers labour. Two scythemen are in blouses, rough trousers and squashed black hats. One swings the double-handed cutter, the other is sharpening his blade. A lad has laid his besom on the ground and is gathering the cuttings into a basket. A girl in cap and long skirt is wielding her broom, close to a gang of mythological characters in stone, with few clothes on.

Elsewhere in the Hartwell paintings, a view of the wilderness behind the house gives glimpses of an obelisk, a temple, a turret and something resembling an igloo. Someone is pulling a roller across the grass towards a nude ancient with huge buttocks, while his fellow is gathering up more cuttings. In the distance, beyond a hedge, a flock of those useful animals dubbed the ‘fleeced foragers’ by William Mason are foraging. Another view shows foragers both fleeced and uddered a-nibble. In the foreground grass is being heaped by two-legged beasts of burden next to a pair of pensive gods. The lawns sweep right up to the walls of the mansion, the front door opening on to the bowling green, upon which the idle rich are at play. The green is enclosed by grass slopes, surmounted by dark barriers of evergreen.

There is another painting of Hartwell, executed twenty years later, in 1757, by a hand other than Nebot’s. By now the topiary has been dug up, and the Octagonal Pond has been replaced by a lake of more ‘natural’ aspect. The classical statues have clearly been breeding. What has not changed are the roles. The gentry and their ladies are still sauntering about murmuring pleasantries to each other, while to one side or the other the peasantry sweat in a silence disturbed only by the swish of the scythe blade or the rasp of sharpening stone on metal. And the smooth, green turf, so soothing in appearance, so insistent in its demands, stretches away as it ever did, and does to this day.

The Hartwell paintings give an idea of how they tended the stuff. But how did they grow it? To lay down the vast expanses required by the Brownian system was a mighty undertaking. The records at Chatsworth in Derbyshire – where Brown was at work in the 1760s – tell us that, having swept away the formal terraces and parterres to the east of the house, he had the ground sown with hayseed, and then left it to its own devices. But there was at least one famous garden creator who did take a closer interest.

A visitor to Painshill, near Cobham in Surrey, wrote in 1769: ‘The general scheme of Mr Hamilton’s garden … is a great Lawn, supposed 200 acres, spotted with trees and surrounded on two sides by Pleasure Grounds.’ The Honourable Charles Hamilton, youngest son of the sixth Earl of Abercorn, organized the making of that lawn himself, and described how it was done in a letter to the Duke of Leinster. These were the essentials:

Cleansing the ground thoroughly from weeds, and laying it down smooth; if any ground was very foul, I generally employed a whole year in clearing it, by ploughing it sometimes five, but at least four times, and harrowing it very much after each ploughing, first with an Ox Harrow, then with small Harrows; this harrowing brings up all the couch grass and weeds to the surface; which after every harrowing I had raked up in heaps and burned … to make the ground even I made them plough the ridges into furrows … then harrow across the ridges … I set a few men to work with spades to beat about some of the loose earth.

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