The Grass is Greener

by Tom Fort

  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 oran
gery 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.’