The Grass is Greener

by Tom Fort

  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.’