The Grass is Greener

by Tom Fort

  Tempting though it is to speculate on the basis of this scorching stuff that the Victorian enthusiasm for the lawn may have had some deep sexual taproot, the truth is probably more prosaic. Certainly, the Gardener’s Chronicle seems to have been unaware of any latent erotic element. ‘The ornamental grass plot in front of the mansion or cottage is to gardening what the stockpot is to cooking,’ it stated in 1874. The lawn’s ascendancy was hardly challenged, but other aspects of Victorian gardening were, and remain, more contentious. The enthusiasm for imported species of conifer and the deployment of coloured gravel, the mania for glass-houses (Paxton’s ‘Hot-houses for the Million’ were launched in the early 1850s) and for filling borders with contrasting blocks of massed perlargoniums, lobelias, petunias and the like, aroused controversy at the time, and have been viewed with something akin to a shudder by subsequent authorities. Robin Lane Fox wrote in extreme terms: ‘Grand Victorian gardens are ghastly … insensitive and flashy … imperious assertion and mere show … precision and swiftly-attained exactness … made by men in a hurry.’

  Lane Fox’s hero, champion in the defence of traditional English values against garish foreign invaders and the worship of ever more ingenious mechanical wonders, was William Robinson. In books such as The English Flower Garden and The Wild Garden, Robinson trumpeted the virtues of the cottage garden tradition and of hardy, self-reliant climbers and shrubs, and railed against the ‘pastry-book gardening’ represented by bedding out. His particular bête noire was an extravagance regarded by conventional opinion of the time as one of the wonders of the world, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham; where Paxton had created around his glass cathedral a Victorian version of Versailles, a geometric masterplan of cascades, fountains, arcades and terraces organized by a mighty central axis into rigid symmetry. It was an overwhelming statement of Man’s mastery over, and divorce from, Nature. Robinson’s alternative ‘natural style’ – in truth, rather imprecisely articulated – embraced beds filled with roses, shrubs and hardy plants, flowering creepers tangled over walls, and wide lawns. But devotion to manicured turf irritated him:

  Mowing the grass once a fortnight in pleasure grounds, as now commonly practised, is a costly mistake. We want shaven carpets of grass here and there, but what nonsense it is for them to be shaved as often as foolish men shave their faces! Think of the labour involved in the ridiculous work of cutting the heads off flowers and grass.

  William Robinson’s objections were not widely shared. The pride taken by the late Victorians in the regular care of their lawns acquired a nationalistic tinge reminiscent of Pepys’s comment about the inferiority of Continentals in the matter. A fanciful snapshot much favoured by gardening journalists was of the foreigner, humbled by the splendour of the English garden in its glory, goggleeyed with amazement at the perfection of its sward. The French gardening authority, Edouard André, conceded the case: ‘The most beautiful lawns are found in England,’ he wrote in 1879. ‘Under the influence of a foggy climate, fertile soil, repeated mowings and rigorous weeding, you obtain these short lawns, as fine as moss, both soft and firm, as even as a carpet.’

  The mower industry responded energetically and profitably to the challenge of assisting in this pursuit of British excellence. New models continued to pour on to the market, accompanied by new gadgets: lawn sprinklers, mechanical grass and leaf collectors and the like. Some of the new mowers came from America: the ‘latest improved Junior Archimedean’ with cutters extended to match the width of the side wheels; the ‘Great American BALL BEARING Lawn Mower (the easiest-running machine made)’ from the Supplee Hardware Co. in Philadelphia; the Columbia from Richmond, Indiana (‘for perfect work and general satisfaction no Dealer or Jobber can afford to overlook it’). Lesser-known British firms strived for resonance in their branding: the Invincible from Crowley and Co; the Balmoral from Hartley and Sugden; the Imperial from Picksley, Sims and Co; the Excelsior from Waite, Burnell and Huggins. Others sought to conjure associations of lightness and convenience: Hirst and Co. with the Charm; Holt and Willis with the Easy; F. Lasseter (an Australian firm) with the Fairy.

  The drawback with all the larger machines, in spite of great advances in efficiency and smoothness, was the muscle-power required to operate them. The first step towards a power-driven mower was obvious: steam. In 1893 James Sumner, a Lancashire blacksmith, patented a steam-powered mower, using the engine from a motorized tricycle he had devised. It was fired by petroleum or paraffin, and after various adaptations was manufactured by the Leyland Steam Motor Company, which was eventually to metamorphose into British Leyland.

  In 1897 two models were offered for sale – a 25-inch machine at £60, and one of 30 inches at £90. Green and Shanks followed the same route, both companies marketing steam-powered mowers at or soon after the turn of the century. But their considerable cost, great size, massive weight (around one and a half tons) and unwieldiness combined to make them little more than impressive curiosities, whose clankings and puffings and enormous turning circles were confined to a few sports grounds and country estates. Their time never came, for the flair and imagination of one of those Ipswich Ransomes made them redundant before they were properly born.

  In 1899, according to the Ransomes archive, James Ransome was working on the development of a petrol-driven mower. He did not invent it, but he seized upon its potential. Three years later, the company introduced the first model. Forty-two inches wide, powered by a six-horsepower engine, and weighing several hundredweight, it was a juggernaut, a gleaming, roaring beast of a machine; but delicate and amenable compared with its steam-powered rival. Edward VII had the two matched on the lawns at Buckingham Palace, and declared the Ransomes the winner. Cricket’s bearded colossus, W. G. Grace, ordered one for his London County Cricket Club at Crystal Palace, and declared that every self-respecting club should do the same, as ‘whenever the ground is soft you could get on it with a motor mower when it would be impossible for a horse machine to be used without harm to the ground’. Mr Prestcott Westcar of Herne Bay bought the first, Cadbury Brothers the second, for their sports ground at Bournville; and the steam mower was doomed to the museum.

  Although it would be many years before the pony and horse-drawn mowers followed the path of the steam machine, it is convenient to see an age ending with the introduction of James Ransome’s brainchild. The year before, the Queen whose reign had begun when Edwin Budding’s mind was still buzzing, had died. During that span of time much had happened: an empire had been extended, a society transformed, the appearance of the country changed beyond recognition. And a passion had been born and come of age, consummated for hosts of ordinary people in the private, personal space around their homes, which they called their gardens. A part of that space was green grass. It had stamped itself on the new suburban geography. At the same time, it had acquired a metaphysical dimension, contributing in a particular way to that collective sense of Englishness or Britishness which seems to us such a powerful characteristic of the age; one now lost, and never likely to be recaptured. The lawn was an aspect of British particularity. Its colour, its texture, its associations, the rituals attending its nurture, were an expression of Britishness. A generation later, this sentiment, suffused with an intensity of nostalgia derived from violent schism with the past, was expressed by the gardening historian, Eleanor Sinclair Rohde:

  The green lawns of this country are still the admiration of the world. The beauty of the matchless lawns in college quadrangles remains for ever in the memory, and lawns are still the chief beauty of many of our most famous gardens. The methods of making them and maintaining them lack the picturesqueness of olden days, though there are still gardens where the discordant sound of the lawn mower is never heard, and the lawns are shorn by men come from generations skilled in the art of the scythe … The foreigner admires, but even with all the resources of science, cannot hope to make lawns to compare with the deep velvety texture of our lawns … For those of us who live in the Old Country, and those of us who
se lot is cast in the great dominions beyond the seas, are equally proud of the fact that in the ‘islands of the West’ we have the greenest and the most beautiful grass in the world.

  Velvet Robes

  Lawns are nature purged of death and sex. No wonder Americans like them so much

  MICHAEL POLLAN

  It is curious that two of the first three American presidents should have contributed significantly towards the development of the American lawn, whereas I have come across no evidence of any British head of state or government evincing anything more than the most superficial interest in grass cultivation. I suppose it has something to do with this: that while in Britain, the lawn evolved over centuries in an episodic and haphazard fashion dictated by the slow maturing of popular taste, in the United States it was, almost from the first, accompanied by and directed by a notion of civic responsibility. The Americans took our randomly assembled ornamental grass culture, adapted it to their own circumstances, and superimposed upon it moral connotations which were to result, within a few generations, in the fairly general acceptance of the axiom that a man’s worth to society was reflected in, and could to a considerable degree be judged by, the condition of his lawn.

  At Mount Vernon, beyond the Potomac, George Washington ordered a bowling green and a deer park, the two separated physically if not visibly by a ha-ha, in the English fashion. An entry in Washington’s diary for 1785 identifies him as the first American lawn champion:

  The appearance of the day and the impracticability of giving, on account of the clamminess of the day, an even face to any more of my lawn until the ground should get dryer, of which there is no immediate prospect, I sowed what was levelled and smoothed of it with English grass seeds; and as soon as the top was so dry as not to stick to the roller, I rolled and cross-rolled it.

  Prints displaying the glories of the first president’s home became extremely popular, and stimulated the imitation by a few wealthy Americans of the English model of mansion surrounded by parkland. A Mrs Pinckney, recently returned from her European tour, had a lawn laid down by her home in South Carolina. Mr William Hamilton commissioned one in Philadelphia, and General Hartwell Cocke complemented his Palladian pile in Fluranna County, Virginia, with an appropriate expanse of trimmed turf. But the idea that smooth, cultivated grass might act as a vegetable stimulant to the virtues of responsibility and citizenship belonged to Thomas Jefferson. The home he built at Monticello in Virginia was intended as an American reinvention of the cultural influences which had so enthused him during his years in Europe. Jefferson’s concept – of a vista flowing from the mansion through the lawned garden fringed by trees to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains – was designed as an expression of national aspiration. Under his direction, it became the University of Virginia, known to generations of its graduates as, simply, The Lawn.

  In spite of Jefferson’s example, Americans in general had more pressing matters on their minds than the benefits of cultivated grass. The native grasses encountered by the first settlers had been annuals. The livestock ate them, and then mostly died – either because they were poisonous, or because it would not grow again. As early as the 1630s, new arrivals were being exhorted to bring grass and clover seed with them, to provide pasturage. That utilitarian example persisted. Seed was sown so that the stomach might be filled, not to delight the eye. Making a new country permitted little time and energy for the refinements of horticulture. Visitors from Europe, such as Cobbett and Dickens, were struck by the untidiness that attended the rapid maturing of a nation. ‘The well-trimmed lawns and green meadows of home are not here,’ observed Dickens, somewhat truistically. ‘And the grass, compared with our ornamental plots and pastures, is rank and wild.’

  The birth of the American suburban ideal, of a detached house standing in its plot, occurred, roughly speaking, in the second half of the 19th century. According to Kenneth T. Jackson’s brilliant study, The Crabgrass Frontier, the spiritual need for space and the corresponding aspiration to live away from the city arose in the first instance from the fear of epidemic diseases such as cholera and yellow fever; and was encouraged by liberation from what had been an acute, constant and largely justifiable fear of nature. As communities were established and grew, those who lived in them felt more secure. Distanced and protected from the perils of the wilderness, they began to see the outdoors as noble and benign in character, rather than dangerous. The space around the new suburban residence became an opportunity for the beneficial virtues of nature, suitably tamed and civilized, to be constantly enjoyed.

  At the same time, a crucial divergence from the English suburban model emerged. The Englishman’s garden was a private matter for himself. Shielded from passing eyes by his house, enclosed in walls, fences and hedges, obscured by tree and shrubs, it was a place of his own. To be sure, he often needed advice on what to do with it; and in the absence of useful ideas of his own, he was liable to subscribe to monotonous uniformity. But whether he did or not was his business, because the world at large was kept at bay. He could indulge his individuality, pursue his own taste for the exotic or the barbarous, in privacy; indeed, in seclusion and even secrecy. But the Americans, moved by a powerful common trust in, and dependence on, the community and its attendant ideals of citizenship, went the other way. They declined to build walls and grow hedges, and hide their homes behind barriers of vegetation. And having established their own way, they set about bolstering it with a moral legitimacy. From the start, the lawn was invested with a righteousness which it has yet to forfeit.

  The first acknowledged authority on American garden design was Andrew Jackson Downing, who – had he not perished at the age of thirty-seven in a fire on a Hudson River steamer, displaying, according to the contemporary accounts, an almost inhuman degree of cool courage – would surely have become the prime shaper of the suburban ideal. As it was, his practical work was mostly done on behalf of a select handful of plutocrats in the eastern states. But his writing reached a wide audience. In one of his ‘Rural Essays’, Downing identifies grass, water and trees as the trinity of essential elements. His apprehension of grass is sensual – ‘the soft turf … thrown like a smooth natural carpet over the swelling outline of the trembling earth … a perfect wonder of tufted freshness and verdure’. Downing proceeds to offer practical advice: the deployment of two yoke of oxen to plough the ground, thorough trenching, the removal of every stone, the sowing at two bushels to the acre of mixed Agrostis vulgaris and Trifolium repens, and the use in mowing of ‘an English scythe’ of the most perfect temper and quality, with an edge like a razor. He returns to the sermon: ‘No expenditure in ornamental gardening is productive of so much beauty as that incurred in producing a well-kept lawn. It is a universal passport to admiration.’

  Downing died in 1852. In the same year, Alexander Jackson Davis was chosen to design what was to be the world’s first ‘picturesque suburb’, Llewellyn Park, in the Orange Mountains to the west of Manhattan. Downing’s precepts – among them that ‘the close proximity of fences to a house gives the whole place a confined and mean character’ – were a powerful influence on Davis’s Utopian concept. His declared principle was to be guided by nature’s bequest. Much of the woodland and underbrush was retained, to give the place an unthreateningly sylvan air. Winding lanes followed the contours of the land, and the principal route through the 50,000 acres was curvilinear. Civilization’s more sordid manifestations – shops, factories, the slaughterhouse – were banished. The average size of each plot was three acres, and a committee of management was elected to ensure that these were maintained in a manner in keeping with the ethos. Llewellyn Park was intended as a model for a new mode of communal existence, proclaimed by its architects to be progressive and democratic. In fact, from the start it was exclusive and discriminatory, suburban bliss made available by invitation to those with the approved attitudes, the required contacts and the wealth.

  Llewellyn Park established the direction of a movement which
was brought to fulfilment in the suburban designs of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and codified in the writings of Frank Jessup Scott. Among the suburbs laid out by Olmsted before he devoted himself to New York’s Central Park, the most celebrated was Riverside, on the edge of Chicago. Olmsted intended the suburb to be, not a refuge from the obnoxious city, but an integration between the best of city and country. Its purpose was to refresh the spirit of the city worker when he returned from his labours, and it therefore had to be pleasing in a convenient, well-ordered way. There must be parks, lakes, commons – places where nature’s healing influences were readily available. The roads must be curved, the spacious homes set back thirty feet ‘to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquillity’.

  But the pleasures were accompanied by duties. The man admitted to communion with these blessings was expected to give something back. For the suburb to function properly, to give of its best, the residents must subscribe to the suburban code. It was their charge and their pleasure to keep their houses tidy, and their gardens – the paradisal borders to the shaded lanes – in an unblemished condition. The moral force of the obligation to conform was irresistible, and it easily bred intolerance. The chief propagandist on behalf of the suburban paradise was Frank Jessup Scott, and it was he who laid down the regulation dealing with the front garden, or front yard: ‘It is unchristian to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of Nature which it has been our good fortune to create … Throwing front grounds together enriches all who take part in the exchange.’ ‘Let your lawn be your home’s velvet robe,’ he wrote, ‘and your flowers its not too promiscuous decoration.’