The Grass is Greener

by Tom Fort

  But Repton’s survival could not disguise the fact that the sun had set on his world and his ways, and was rising on a new world, which required a new prophet. His name was John Claudius Loudon, and he was the true father of modern gardening.

  Loudon, the son of a Lanarkshire farmer, was a man of many parts: designer, illustrator, writer, editor, architect, traveller, plantsman. In none of these, taken singly, was he outstanding; indeed, he hardly rose above mediocrity. His genius lay in his appreciation of the new market, and the way in which he reached out to it, combining sure instinct with an awesome thoroughness. Loudon’s motivation was primarily moral rather than entrepreneurial. He was driven to deploy his almost inhuman capacity for industry by his sense of duty. His mission was to serve his fellows by educating them. To do so properly required him to acquire and digest a colossal mass of learning, and distil from it a primer of instruction. Loudon’s task was to create taste, for the benefit of society. He was no charlatan. He knew his stuff, perhaps too well. Sometimes one has the sense of him almost drowning in the ocean of his erudition.

  With the unstinting help of his devoted and diligent wife, Jane, and aided by a network of researchers and correspondents, Loudon organized a succession of mighty enterprises which shaped home life for the upper and middle classes in late Georgian and early Victorian Britain. He founded and edited the Gardener’s Magazine, the Magazine of Natural History, the Architectural Magazine; compiled the Encyclopaedia of Gardening, the Encyclopaedia of Plants, the Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, and the Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (eight volumes classifying British trees and shrubs); wrote a series of meaty works of instruction on other matters; and died exhausted and broken in health when he was sixty.

  The work most characteristic of Loudon and his age is the Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion. On the first of its 752 densely packed pages, the tone of earnest, passionate certitude is established:

  To labour for the sake of arriving at a result, and to be successful in attaining it, are, as cause and effect, attended by a certain degree of satisfaction to the mind, however simple and rude the labour may be, and however unimportant the result obtained …

  This is the statement of Loudon’s philosophy: that the performance of a task is, of itself, good; better, by implication, than idleness. His sonorous prolixity invests a truism with the weight of a great principle. Having established it, he proceeds to grade the moral worth of outdoor activities:

  A man who plants a hedge or sows a grass plot in his garden lays a more certain foundation for enjoyment than he who builds a wall and lays down a gravel walk; and hence the enjoyment of a citizen whose recreation, at his suburban residence, consists in working in his garden must be higher in the scale than that of him who amuses himself, in the plot around his house, in shooting at a mark or playing at bowls.

  An audience which knows no better is being encouraged to accept a moral distinction between enjoyment and amusement. Loudon is telling them that it is better to have something to show for the activity of their leisure – a hedge, a lawn, a flower bed – than not; and that something which grows is better than something which does not. Even more tellingly, he legitimizes and dignifies the dirtying of the fingers. Not only is it permissible to labour in the creation and improvement of a garden, it is positively good – good for the body, good for the mind, good for the character. Here, with one bound, we have left behind the world of gardens commissioned of designers by aristocrats in silks and wigs who would have fainted at the proximity of a dirty spade. The democratic garden is born, and with it a nation of gardeners.

  It is easy to laugh at Loudon’s Presbyterian solemnity; easier still to yawn. But by understanding what he was driving at, we may understand something about what the massed ranks of the new moneyed class did with the suburban residences sprouting forth across the kingdom. In this vast, tedious book, Loudon – by addressing himself one by one to a numbing multiplicity of domestic issues – codified a body of knowledge, and offered it up to the class which, little by little, was assuming the running of the country. It did much more than provide an answer to every question which the owning of a home could produce. In it, people could find themselves, their place. An epic social hierarchy was defined.

  At the bottom of Loudon’s pecking order are fourth-rate houses, built in a row ‘principally for the occupation of mechanics’, with appropriately modest gardens attached. Above those come third-rate properties, whose gardens may decently include fountains, a rustic thatched folly, even a Doric temple of discreet proportions. The second category belongs to ‘wealthy tradesmen, professional people, and gentlemen of good fortune’; above which is placed the first rate, mansions rather than mere houses, surrounded by gardens which ‘can scarcely be less than from fifty to one hundred acres’.

  Once you have identified your place on the ladder, Loudon tells you all you need to know. Think of the prevailing winds, which way the dust will blow. Note the position of the sun and work out where the shade will fall. Avoid tanneries, soapworks, large manure heaps, schools and their noisy charges, churches and their bells. Be careful with the positioning of fireplaces. Attend to the matter of smoking chimneys. Lay out your laundry, larder and kitchen with regard to their interdependent functions.

  For Loudon, the house and the gardens form a unity, and are complementary to each other. ‘It has often struck us with surprise’, he admonishes, ‘that the proprietors of the finest residences in England, noblemen and gentelmen of high education and refinement in other things … should commit the laying out of their gardens to their gardeners.’ To him, house and garden had equal status; for what do you see when you look from one, but the other? And, in Loudon’s view, what people of taste wanted to see from the windows of their drawing rooms was ‘the smoothness of green turf’.

  The lawn was Loudon’s starting point, the first, essential element of the garden canvas. In the mass of designs which he devised to match the aspirations of the various social classes, the lawn was given the status of the indispensable. Loudon deployed shrubs around it, cut flower beds into it, planted trees within it, placed upon it seats, urns, statues, arches and other assorted embellishments. The Loudonian garden, whether belonging to rude mechanic or blue-blooded earl, was absolutely the creation of Man. In it, the elements of the picturesque were refined and subjugated to an extent that would have made it difficult for the Reverend William Gilpin to recognize the child as his own.

  In a radical break with the past, fleeced foragers and unkempt ruminants were banished. Loudon’s ideal was of

  the elegant picturesque … stillness and consecration to Man – stillness, as being without animals or moving objects; and consecration to Man, from the mown surface greatly heightened by the circumstance of the branches of the trees reclining to the ground, which can never happen when sheep or cattle are admitted.

  Having endorsed the shorn, animal-free lawn as one of the essentials of the moral garden, Loudon – unlike his predecessors – attended in exhaustive detail to the business of producing it. There was only one way: through a regime of regular, skilful scything and the thorough removal of the grass:

  For the cleaning of a lawn after a morning’s mowing, every alternative swarth is to be raked with a common hayrake in such a way as to leave a breadth of two swarths for the long-handled besom. Along the centre of this space, a man starts with a flattened besom on the end of a nine-foot handle and sends all the grass he meets with a right and a left, leaving these two swarths cleanly swept. A boy or woman, with a short-handled besom, follows after and sweeps tens yards of the ridge upward and ten yards downward, thus leaving the lawn studded with heaps of grass sixty feet apart the other. This is again basketted into the grass-cart by a man and a boy with a couple of boards and a besom.

  Followed all that? Splendid! The Loudon blueprint enacted is a pleasure to witness:

  When this plan is followed, all is regularity; the long-handled besom, doing the bulk of the b
rushing without ever having to touch a blade of grass twice over, is a manly, straightforward sweeper; for the person stands upright as a dart, and moves forward in a line, swinging his arms in an even balance, furrowing the greensward whilst the women and boys with their four-foot besoms lay it in heaps.

  Coming off the printed page, it sounds straightforward and painless; and would have been, assuming you were the one giving the orders. But imagine the appalling drudgery of it! Picture, if you can, the scythemen, up before dawn to be ready to catch the grass while still wet with dew, fracturing the silence with the rasping of stone on cutting edge, and behind the swinging of the blade, the platoon of sweepers swishing with their besoms, and behind them the gatherers, humping their baskets. And remember that, even as the blades ceased their swiping, and the baskets were being filled, the irrepressible vigour of the stuff itself, the grass, would ensure that the whole laborious ritual must be performed again within the week or the fortnight.

  The labour could be found – men, women and boys ready to toil through all the hours of daylight in return for the means to sustain life, and little more. But the brutishness of the work did trouble Loudon, who was a properly enlightened and – within normal limitations – compassionate Victorian. He was aware that the workers belonged to the same species as himself rather than to that of mules, oxen and other four-legged beasts of burden (the lawn outside his own house, in Bayswater, was even more of a burden than most, as his practice of plantings bulbs in it meant that it had to be cut with shears). Loudon noted the ‘tendency to oppression’ in the labour, although there is no sign that he ever considered leaving the precious greensward to its own devices.

  It seems most improbable that Loudon’s instructions on lawn care were widely followed, if only because of the forces and strategic precision they demanded. But on a more general level, he was instrumental in stimulating an extraordinary flowering of horticultural passion, and through the popular success of his various enterprises was able to exercise a dominant influence over the way that passion expressed itself.

  One of Loudon’s devotees was Samuel Barber, a neighbour of the Wordsworths at Grasmere. They mocked him for his obsession with Loudonian teaching – ‘his works at the cottage begin to be too ridiculous for anything,’ wrote Mary Wordsworth in 1824. Loudon himself visited Barber’s garden eight years later and found it ‘decidedly the most perfect thing of the kind we have ever seen’. It fulfilled his law of thematic consistency, while the poet and his entourage found its ‘fairy chapel and ten thousand new things’ absurd, and objected to the artificiality of its unity and its incongruity with the surrounding Lakeland and the past (for the same reason, Wordsworth detested the fashion for whitewashing cottages, which he believed should be ‘received into the living principle of things’; advice which might have caused an architect to scratch his head).

  Dorothy Wordsworth took a similarly dim view of those who would deposit their pallid versions of Capability Brown’s formula on her beloved Lakeland. Inspecting Mr Curwen’s new mansion and park on one of Windermere’s islands, she found his ‘shrubberies pitiful enough under the native trees … they have made no substantial glades, it is merely a lawn with a few miserable young trees standing as if they were half-starved. There are no sheep or cattle upon these lawns. It is neither one thing nor the other – neither natural, nor wholly cultivated and artificial which it was before.’

  Wordsworth took a keen interest in gardening matters. He applauded the polemics of Uvedale Price against the unnatural practices of the Brownian school. Unlike Price, however, he did not believe that picturesque beauty was an inherent quality of objects or landscape. Wordsworth was concerned with the human response, and its potential for development if properly stimulated. His own garden at Rydal Mount comprised stone-walled terraces, reached by rough stone steps planted with flowers, and thick with moss and ferns. There was a lawn, too; of the unmanicured variety, I imagine. It clearly acted on the poetic mind:

  This lawn, a carpet all alive

  With shadows flung from leaves – to strive

  In dance, amid a press

  Of sunshine, an apt emblem yields

  Of worldings revelling in the fields

  Of strenuous idleness;

  Less quick the stir when tide and breeze

  Encounter, and to narrow seal

  Forbid a moment’s rest;

  The medley less when boreal lights

  Glance to and fro, like aery sprites

  To feats of arms address!

  Yet, spite of this eager strife

  This ceaseless play, the genuine life

  That serves the steadfast hours

  Is in the grass beneath, that grows

  Unheeded, and the mute repose

  Of sweetly-smelling flowers.

  It may not be sublime, but there are some nice lines in it. Other poets glanced at lawns – Arnold had one ‘wet, bird-haunted’, while Hardy sent a hedgehog furtively across another in the ‘nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm’. But only William Empson – as far as I have been able to discover – wrote a better poem about grass. It is called ‘Rolling the Lawn’, and it is as short as it is sardonic:

  You can’t beat English lawns. Our final hope

  Is flat despair. Each morning therefore ere

  I greet the office, through the weekday air,

  Holding the Holy Roller at the slope

  (The English fetish, not the Texas Pope)

  Hither and thither on my toes with care

  I roll ours flatter and flatter. Long, in prayer,

  I grub for daisies at whose roots I grope.

  Roll not the abdominal wall; the walls of Troy

  Lead, since a plumb-line ordered, could destroy.

  Roll rather, where no mole dare sap, the lawn;

  And ne’er his tumuli shall tomb your brawn.

  World, roll yourself; and bear your roller, soul,

  As martyrs gridirons, when God calls the roll.

  Loudon made it his business personally to inspect every serious garden in the land, among them Wordsworth’s, which he rather liked. The sort of garden he disliked was represented in its most extreme form by the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Gothic extravaganza at Alton Towers. This fantastic jumble of pseudo-Indian temples decorated with nonsensical hieroglyphics, castellated stables, turfed steps, imitation Stonehenge, iron-tongued, glass-eyed serpent, pagodas, gilded conservatories, corkscrew fountains, shellwork, a valley with a bridge over it but no water, and clutter of other assorted nonsense struck the Lowland Scot as being in ‘excessively bad taste’. It drew from him one of his few neat morals: ‘It is the work of a morbid imagination joined to the command of unlimited resources.’

  In contrast to Lord Shaftesbury’s fevered aberrations, the example set by the Earl of Mansfield at Kenwood was delightful to Loudon in ‘the perfect unity of expression which prevails in the views obtained in every part of the grounds’. But even Kenwood was eclipsed by the gardens which aroused Loudon to an ecstasy of adoration, those attached to ‘the Lawrencian Villa’ in Drayton Green. These were created, at what must have been fabulous expense, by the wife of a celebrated surgeon who himself treated Loudon, and did much to relieve his discomforts. The great authority admired the husband, seems to have been a touch in love with Mrs (later Lady) Lawrence, and was clearly infatuated with her gardens. Loudon describes the charms of the twenty-eight acres in the most exhaustive detail: the rhododendrons and azaleas nestling the house, the Italian walk sentried by statues, the rustic arch furnishing a glimpse of a paddock grazed by contented cows, walls thick with entwined rose and shrub, another arch with Cupid prancing on one leg above it, fountains and urns, beds brilliant with roses, orchids and perlargoniums; and at the heart, a big, green lawn, the place from which every view presented itself. The Lawrencian miracle was that, amid such profusion, there was no confusion – the result, says Loudon, of having ‘always an ample surface of naked lawn in the foreground or middle distance’.

&n
bsp; It was all very well for Loudon, driven by his mission, and Mrs Lawrence, with her husband’s abundant earnings at her disposal, to deal in these aspects of perfection. The law according to Loudon – that from the house should extend the ‘extreme smoothness and high polish of the lawn’ – was easy to lay down. But how were lesser mortals to observe it, without the assistance of the unpaid fleeced forager and his friends? Only by undertaking the considerable expense and trouble of having a small army of sweating labourers, plodding around the place with their scythes and besoms and baskets for hours on end, week in, week out, throughout the grass-growing season. It was a situation that cried out for one of those flashes of genius which, again and again, lit the sky of Victorian social advance. When it came, it changed the face of the English garden.

  MUSINGS FROM THE SHED

  (1)

  Albert’s Morning March

  Our home was at the end of the village, between the prongs of the fork formed by the roads to Maidenhead and to Windsor. The house was early 19th century, with later additions, architecturally undistinguished, but spacious enough for us five children, our parents, a resident grandmother and a nanny. The kitchen, where we mostly ate, was warmed by a great cream-coloured Aga, fed in those distant days with anthracite coals which rattled and clanged as they slipped from the hod into the glowing, flickering heat within. The kitchen door opened on to a brick terrace. Beyond rose a giant cedar of Lebanon. The spread of its branches and those of the big oak beside the orchard shaded and shadowed all the upper part of the garden. Beneath the cedar lay a carpet of needles, broken here and there by patches of malnourished grass fighting for existence. Beneath the oak were the daffodils, growing in long grass which was left uncut.