The Grass is Greener

by Tom Fort

  These remarks were occasioned by the arrival on the scene of that American intruder to which Thomas Green took such exception. The novelty of the Archimedean was that, with a cutter shaped like a screw, it scattered the cuttings on the ground rather than depositing them in a box. A warm debate ensued over its virtues and failings. Some held that it had the advantage over machines of the traditional British design, because it could cut when the grass was long and wet. Others objected to the unsightliness of the strewn cuttings, and the ribbing effect left by the screw. To and fro the rival bands of supporters batted their experiences and prejudices, until the editors closed the matter, ruling that the home-grown tradition had the edge in quality of finish, while the newcomer had its uses in gardens where high quality was not the first consideration.

  By that year, 1870, Ferrabee had fallen by the wayside, and the market was dominated by Ransomes, Green and Shanks, with the Ipswich firm – Ransomes, Sims and Head, to give it its full name – leading the way. In 1867 Ransomes had introduced its ‘Automaton’ range, in which the use of steel, improved gearing, and ball bearings provided a markedly superior performance in terms of noise, durability, finish and ease of use. By the end of the decade more than three thousand Automatons had been sold, ranging from the 10-inch model ‘for a lady or lad’, to the 20-incher requiring a man and a boy. Five years later sales had reached ten thousand, and a new factory had been opened in Ipswich devoted exclusively to meeting the booming demand. By then Ransomes had inaugurated the Little Gem, available in 6-inch and 8-inch widths, which soon rivalled the Automaton in popularity.

  Apart from the Archimedean screw, the other important design advance of this period came from Manchester, where two engineers, Frederick Follows and John Bate, patented a mower which dispensed with the back roller, the cutters being driven by two side wheels. This made the machine much lighter, and the other companies soon appropriated the innovation.

  It would be irksome to record the expansion of the motor mower industry in detail. It is enough to state that by, say, 1873 – the year Livingstone’s body was brought back from Africa to be buried at Westminster Abbey – the industry had come of age, able to satisfy any reasonable demand. There was a reliable model for every case: the lady whose idea of amusement was to trip across the grass leaving a 6-inch-wide strip behind her; the gentleman with a serious sense of the benefits to self and society in the well-tempered lawn; the head gardener with a sweeping sward and a master who demanded perfection; the groundsman at a cricket ground; the secretary of a croquet or lawn tennis club. And the keenness of the competition had the customary effect on prices. The cost of the basic 16-inch cylinder machine hardly changed in the second half of the 19th century. The Ferrabee model of 1848 cost six pounds ten shillings, the Ransomes New Automaton of 1888 the same.

  Poor John Ferrabee! Poor Edwin Budding! Their vision and resourcefulness had made all this possible, yet no one remembered them. Could James Ferrabee have seen the first page of Ransomes catalogue of 1888, he must have groaned in envious despair:

  Ransomes Lawn Mowers. In constant use in the Gardens of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, HRH the Prince of Wales, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, HRH the Duke of Connaught, the Royal Horticultural Society, the Royal Botanic Society … His Grace the Duke of Northumberland … the Most Honourable the Marquis of Downshire … the Earl of Egmont … Lord Brabazon … Lady Jane Taylor … Madame Patti …

  And so it goes on, the roll call of the highborn, the rich, the successful, the celebrated – united by a willingness to associate their distinguished names with that of a humble engineering company grown fat by making something which, in its essentials, was still the same machine as had been pushed around those meadows by the Frome back in the days when Victoria was no more than a princess. It is to be hoped that the grass in Stroud cemetery – where James Ferrabee was laid to rest – was not kept in order by a Ransome!

  The Glory of the Garden

  They were the smoothest lawns in the world, stretching down to the liquid slowness and making, where the water touched them, a line as even as the rim of a champagne glass

  HENRY JAMES

  During the first twenty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the balance of gardening power shifted decisively from the commissioning élite to the more-or-less actively involved, property-owning middle classes – where, broadly speaking, it has remained ever since. Of course, great men with resources to match continued to engage the successors of Brown and Repton to aggrandize the environs of their great homes. Paxton at Chatsworth, Barron at Elvaston Castle, Barry and Fleming at Trentham organized gardens on the grandest scale, whose common purpose, whatever the differences in realization, was to display the brilliance and originality of the mind of man, rather than to refine and harmonize what nature had already provided. Lesser mortals marvelled at the boldness of these heroic designs, but generally did not take them home with them. For their own suburban grounds, they tended to seek advice from more modest and congenial sources.

  The day of the professional gardening writer, ushered in by Mr and Mrs Loudon, had come to stay. No longer was the subject left – as it had been in the 18th century – to poets and belletrists such as Pope and Walpole, or to wealthy amateurs and choleric controversialists like Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight; or, indeed, to axe-grinders and self-appointed arbiters of taste such as Thomas Whately and William Mason. What the new purchasing public wanted was not flowery theorizing spiced with Augustan conceits, but solid, practical advice on what to do with their gardens: how to lay them out, what to grow, how to grow it, where to obtain the recommended plants, how to keep it all in order, how much it was all going to cost. The new authorities had to come down from the heights along which their literary predecessors had ranged, to take up a position just slightly elevated above the heads of their audience, akin to that of parsons in pulpits. Unlike men of the cloth, their advice had to be sound and comprehensible, for they had to please their congregations or perish. But a strong moral element to the sermonizing was still obligatory.

  One of the absolutes in the moral code of gardening was the lawn. Its place was energetically promoted by James Shirley Hibberd, probably the most influential of Loudon’s successors. Hibberd was a sailor’s son, born in Stepney, later resident in Stoke Newington and Muswell Hill. As well as editing two periodicals, the Floral World and a resuscitated Gardener’s Magazine, he produced a clutch of books and monographs, some – such as Profitable Gardening, The Amateur’s Rose Book and The Amateur’s Greenhouse – unpretentiously practical, others – among them The Ivy, The Fern Garden and Brambles and Bay Leaves – more esoteric. Hibberd’s range of interest was far-flung, his curiosity boundless. But the constant at the heart of whatever garden he was constructing, in reality or in his mind, was the lawn.

  He presented his articles of faith in The Town Gardener of 1859. ‘A piece of bright green turf and a goodly show of evergreen shrubs are the very essential features of a garden, whatever its size or situation,’ he wrote. Almost twenty years later, in The Amateur’s Flower Garden, he was urging ‘the greatest possible breadth of well-kept turf consistent with the area enclosed for the purposes of pleasure’. His stated purpose, in the earlier book, was to assist the metropolitan to ‘insure a patch of bright green grass in the very centre of London or any other great and smoky city’; to have for himself a version of the gardens of the Inner and Middle Temple, where ‘Mssrs Dale and Broome teach a daily lesson all the year round to all those who are willing to learn the alphabet of town gardening.’ (This, we understand, is a man who knows gardeners by name, and wishes to honour them.)

  Hibberd was, by inclination, a turf rather than a seed man. But there were dangers: ‘Good turf is a rarity and it is worth any amount of effort of trouble to secure it.’ Meadow turf, as recommended by Cobbett and others, was regrettably ‘utterly unfit for any garden … You must go instead to Mr Lawson of Piccadilly, Mr Clarke of Bishopsgate, Suttons of Reading.’ (Hibberd later abandoned this
advice, praising the capacity of meadow turf – given time and care – to acquire a texture ‘fit for a princess in a fairy tale’.) Worst of all was to sow with the sweepings of haylofts, which ‘promises well at first … but the first drought burns it brown and the rains that follow bring up thousands of weeds’.

  Hibberd’s affection for the lawn embraced the feel of it as well as the look. He abhorred grass which was ‘like flint to the foot’. While disapproving of plantains, daisies and dandelions, he opened his arms to another invader: ‘In my opinion, spite of the dictum of gardeners, a moderate growth of moss is absolutely essential to the thorough beauty and enjoyment of a lawn.’ Moss was ‘as deliciously soft as a down bed, so that if you would roll about in it in ecstasies at the glory of summer, you are in no danger of bruising your elbows and scapulae’.

  To furnish the surface for these scenes of abandon, Hibberd recommended a selection of suitable varieties of seed, including crested dog’s tail (Cynosurus cristatus), fine-leaved fescue (Festuca tenuifolia) and perennial white clover (Trifolium repens perenne). As these were also approved by Mrs Loudon, it can be assumed that by the mid-1850s the best nurseries were able to provide the essential commodity whose lack had ever been the lawnsman’s chief bugbear; although the reliability of identification and germination continued to be nagging problems.

  For Shirley Hibberd, writing in the 1850s, there was already only one sensible way to impose control on cultivated grass: ‘A mowing machine keeps a lawn in much better trim than a scythe. The grass can be cut by anyone who has sufficient strength to work an ordinary garden roller; it is therefore particularly well-suited to amateurs who are not used to the scythe.’ Although, at a later date, Hibberd found himself undecided between the ‘cut-and-scatter’ Archimedean and the ‘cut-and-collect’ Shanks, of the necessity of using a machine to cut grass, he had no doubt.

  Like others, he had been entranced, briefly, by the dream of a lawn which had all the aesthetic and moral qualities of grass, but was liberated from the tedious task of eternal mowing. In The Town Garden, he was aroused to a passion of enthusiasm by a new species of lawn displayed in the gardens of A. Mongredieu Esq. in Forest Hill –

  a dwarf-growing and tufted alpine plant which forms an unbroken surface of the richest green, heightened in beauty during July by the production of myriads of snow-white blossoms … unaffected by drought or frost … softer to the foot than a Turkey carpet … it never requires mowing … the older it gets, the more perfect in its beauty.

  But alas, the charms of Spergula pilifera – otherwise known as spurry – were a snare and a delusion. And alas for Mssrs Henderson and Sons, nurserymen of St John’s Wood, who must have imagined themselves on to a winner when they introduced it. Prolonged acquaintance with its habits revealed incurable character flaws to Hibberd. It could not, after all, tolerate drought, and demanded such labour to be kept free of weeds as to make the old chore of scything seem almost painless. In The Amateur’s Flower Garden, he recorded wistfully that in the previous two decades he had seen no more than three Spergula lawns that were of ‘agreeable remembrance’; and he concluded that the troublesome nature of the plant had banished the prospect of the lawn that never needed to be mown.

  Another promoter of the lawn’s virtues was Edward Kemp, chief instrument in the creation of the country’s first major municipal park, Birkenhead Park (although it was actually designed by Paxton), and later its salaried superintendent. In 1850 Kemp published his How to Lay Out a Small Garden, a dreary and pedagogic attempt to combat what he called ‘the incongruity and dullness observable in the majority of gardens’. Whether he diminished or enhanced that dullness is a matter of argument. Unlike Hibberd, he had nothing of great-interest to say about lawns, contenting himself with observing that they were cheaper to maintain than flower borders and ‘should therefore abound where economy of keeping is sought’; and advising against placing walks and flower beds that destroyed ‘the smoothness, continuance and extent of the lawn’, and in favour of removing irregularities ‘that are quite incompatible with high polish’.

  Kemp’s books sold in very large numbers, and his dutiful endorsement of the place of the lawn may well have helped persuade the new suburbanites to fall into line. The professional gardener and journalist, Robert Fish, knew a great deal more about grass culture than Kemp, and returned to the subject repeatedly in the column which he wrote for a number of years in the Gardener’s Magazine. Fish’s approach was practical rather than theoretical. He recorded struggles with plantains and daisies, leaves and worms, downpours and droughts. He favoured the mower for efficiency, but retained a soft spot for the scythe, as it kept the lawn ‘nice at bottom’. A recurrent theme in Fish’s writing was that the supposed economy of the lawn was a myth. A lawn, he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘is the most expensive thing in a gentleman’s garden’.

  But people didn’t mind. They may well, in the first place, have laid down their grass because they had been told it was the proper and economical thing to do. But then they found that they liked the lawn for reasons that had little or nothing to do with thrift or the advertised ease of upkeep. They liked it because of the look of it, and the way it helped to fill the garden, and showed off the flowers and shrubs to best advantage. The lawn gave them pride in their homes; and they found that, far from begrudging the expenditure of time, cash and labour that it demanded, they liked it the more for the demands it made.

  Thus did the lawn annexe the pleasure grounds of the professional classes. And as it did so, it claimed a place in the public consciousness. Its green blades spread from the pages of the specialized periodicals and books into popular fiction.

  The opening scene in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington takes place upon the lawn outside the Small House, where the obstinately virtuous Lily Dale – the novelist’s favourite heroine though not mine – her sister Bel, the Squire’s son Bernard and Bernard’s shady friend Adolphus Crosbie, destined to be Lily Dale’s ruin, stroll forth for croquet and genteel gossip. ‘The glory of the Small House’, relates Trollope, ‘certainly consists in its lawn, which is as smooth, as level, and as much like velvet as grass has ever been made to look.’ To Lily Dale, her lawn is a matter of much quiet pride, superior in its absence of tufts to the much broader expanse of turf beside the Great House. The Squire, however, cares nothing for tufts, nor for croquet. His pride has another source: ‘He would stand in the middle of the grass plot, surveying his grounds and taking stock of the shrubs and the flowers and the fruit trees around him; for he never forgot that it was all his own.’

  Michael Waters, in his study The Garden In Victorian Literature, identified the particular usefulness of the lawn on the novelistic stage, in encouraging through its informality private exchanges which were simultaneously open to the narrator’s eye. In the first chapter of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James sees the ‘wide carpet of turf’ outside the country house as ‘seeming but the extension of a luxurious interior’. Upon the ‘smooth, dense turf’ his cast of aristocrats and assorted well-bred idlers sip tea and nibble at sandwiches, while he eavesdrops on the cadences of their refined chat. But neither James nor Trollope displays any curiosity as to how their perfect lawns achieved their perfection. Their interest is restricted to exploiting them as a setting for the manipulation of characters.

  For a fuller appreciation of the dramatic possibilities of grass and its cultivation, we must turn to one in the very long string of now forgotten romances by the once immensely popular Rhoda Broughton. In her novel of 1886, Doctor Cupid, this clergyman’s daughter presented a scene of such wondrous absurdity and throbbing, half-suppressed sexuality as to make any subsequent lawn-based encounter short of a satanic orgy necessarily tame. Since no one, apart from the most assiduous student of third-rate Victorian fiction is likely to have heard of the book, let alone to have read it, it is worth looking at in a little detail.

  The situation is thus: the hero, John Talbot, is supposed to be in love with mali
cious, married Lady Betty Harborough, the failings of whose character are suggested by her fondness for lounging in a hammock, smoking cigarettes and reading the Sunday papers; but in fact his heart belongs to sweet Betty. She has a lawn in need of mowing, and has been lent a machine by ‘milady’ to do it; but her man, Jacob, has fallen ill and the boy who would normally help him is ‘out vagranting’. John Talbot’s eyes are ‘bent upon the sward, today not shorn to quite its normal pitch of velvet nicety’. He is moved to an outrageous suggestion:

  ‘Why should I not mow?’ asks he at last.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, I; and you lead the pony.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘A joke – no! Will you tell me where the pony is?

  May I harness it?’

  Betty looks at him, and the grass, already an inch and a half long, and yields. They harness the pony, place the animal’s feet in its mowing shoes.

  They set off. Loudly whirrs the machine. Up flies the grass in a little green cloud, which the sun instantly turns to deliciously-scented new-mown hay.

  The noise precludes much in the way of conversation. But that does not trouble John Talbot, marching behind his beloved, as he feasts his eyes on her ‘flat back, her noble shoulders, the milky nape of her neck’. As for Betty:

  Her eye, flattered by her shaven lawn, cannot rest very severely upon him who has shaven it for her. Her spirits have risen; exhilarated by the wholesome exercise, by the sunshine, by who knows what?

  Who indeed? Could it be that Betty of the flat back and noble shoulders is a-tremble at the thought of her fellow mower, unclothed in the warm, soft herbage, hands greened with grass stains reaching out for her ardent flesh? I think so.