by Tom Fort
For a time in the fifties, a new grass, zoysia, was hailed as the answer to contemporary needs. But gradually, the practice of mixing varieties of seed gained ground. North of Washington DC, the climate smiled upon a blend of fescues, bents, meadow grass and perennial ryegrass. In the southern states, seedsmen would recommend zoysia, bahua, Bermuda grass and centipede grass. Whatever was grown, the essence of the marketing strategy was to intimate that it was not good enough; and simultaneously to hold up, at a tantalizing distance, that remarkably well-preserved phantom, the Promised Lawn. The objective was to persuade the consumer that the acquisition of a new machine, the sowing of a new variety of seed, another application of fertilizer, another contract with that helpful lawn care company, would persuade the phantom to take on flesh.
The strategy was triumphantly successful. The maxim that ‘the grass is greener …’ reflected a deep-seated source of inadequacy; a study carried out in Virginia in the early 1980s found that 80 per cent of home-owners believed, and were worried, that their lawns were average or below average. The grip exercised by the orthodoxy became unshakeable. By 1992 four-fifths of the thirty million acres of space around American detached houses was lawn. More than fifty million Americans personally tended lawns (a third more than bothered with flowers, nearly ten times as many as were interested in growing fruit). Seven and half billion dollars was being spent annually on lawn care. (A darker side to this otherwise glowing moon was the steady increase in mowing accidents, to more than sixty thousand in 1989.)
The confirmation in the collective consciousness of the bond between home and lawn, home provider and lawn care, was immune to serious challenge. But it could be gently mocked, as in an article in Life Magazine in 1969:
Let a man drink or default, cheat on his taxes or cheat on his wife, and the community will find forgiveness in its heart. But let him fail to keep his front lawn mown, and be seen doing it, and those hearts will turn to stone. For the American front lawn is a holy place, constantly worshipped but never used. Only its high priest, the American husband, may set foot on it, and then only to perform the sacred rites: mowing with a mower, edging with an edger, sprinkling with a sprinkler, and rooting with a rooter to purify the temple of profane weeds.
By this time Rachel Carson had produced her famous clarion call on behalf of what was to become known as ‘the environment’, Silent Spring, in which she drew her countrymen’s attention to the destruction and despoilment being wrought on their world in the name of progress. Concern was focussed on the atrocious effects resulting from the massive use of DDT, which was banned in 1972. It was succeeded by Diazinon, which was gratefully embraced by the turfgrass industry and energetically promoted; until it, too, was indicted for killing wildlife and suspected links with cancer, skin rash, and damage to liver and other organs, and outlawed. Other toxins went the same way, among them parathion (once warmly recommended to gardeners by John C. Shread of the Connecticut Experiment Station, with the caution that it was ‘extremely injurious to humans and animals’); and the worm exterminator, chlordane, whose passing is to this day mourned by many lawn care professionals.
Even though the more obviously destructive lawn care aids have now disappeared, the environmental attack on the American lawn has intensified over the past twenty years. A book by Herbert Bormann and other ecoscientists, Redesigning the American Lawn, attempted to polarize the arguments around two alternatives. One is what the authors define as the Freedom Lawn, in which a host of different plants – among them dandelions, violets, bluets, spurry, chickweed, timothy and quackgrass – flourish in mutual tolerance, adapting with untidy but comfortable ease to the vagaries of climate, extending an open invitation to any bird, beast, insect or invertebrate which fancies dropping by, in harmony with owner and the world around. The other is the Industrial Lawn, a ‘chemically dependent eco-system’, weed-free, pest-free, continuously green, relentlessly mown, wholly unattuned to its setting, never wholly achievable, thirsty (average annual requirement ten thousand gallons of water), vastly expensive, vastly lucrative.
While the eco-warriors hammered away at the wastefulness and destructiveness inherent in the lawn faith, others concentrated on its central tenet, its claim to virtue. Chief among these has been the writer Michael Pollan. He analyses the doctrine that the lawn ‘looks sort of natural – it’s green, it grows’. But he finds appearance and reality at odds: ‘In fact it represents a subjugation of the forest as utter and complete as a parking lot.’ Pollan’s judgement is: ‘A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.’
In a chapter in his book Second Nature, Pollan mocks the tyranny of the faith and the way in which society endeavours to enforce conformity (he relates the story of the Thoreau scholar whose wildflower meadow falls foul of a local by-law prohibiting ‘noxious weeds’). He wrinkles his nose at ‘the unmistakeable odour of virtue that hovers in this country over a scrupulously maintained lawn’, and repudiates the tyranny of ‘civilization’s knife’ – the mower. Pollan pushes his rebellion against conformity to the ultimate, by declaring publicly his intention to plant a hedge along his boundary.
The murmur of dissent continues to be heard, but the established religion still prevails. In 1991 Michael Pollan wrote an editorial in the New York Times calling on the President to have the lawns surrounding the White House dug up and replaced by wetlands, meadows, vegetable gardens and apple orchards. His cry was not heeded. The seat of government continues to nestle in Frank Jessup Scott’s ‘velvet robe’, seeking to exemplify – however ludicrously, given the antics of some incumbents – Charles B. Mills’s dictum about public and private probity. The mowers hum, sprinklers throw their spray, washing into the emerald turf the prescribed cocktails of fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide.
For who, beyond a handful of vegans, fruitists, Thoreauphiles, wilderness freaks, back-to-nature fanatics and other assorted eco-maniacs, actually wants a Freedom Lawn? Robert W. Schery, former head of the Lawn Institute – the lobbying mouthpiece of the American turfgrass industry – asked and answered the question some years ago: ‘Who wants a fare of crabgrass and dandelions, lawn seed swept up from the haymow, nonpowered, cast-iron push-mowers, fresh manure as your only fertilizer? Not many!’
A look at the Lawn Institute’s current website substantiates Mr Shery’s contention. Half a million people work in the turfgrass industry. Total spending on professional landscaping, lawn care and tree care is running at fourteen billion dollars a year and rising. A fifth of homeowners, twenty-two million of them, hire such help. Spending on lawn care amounts to one third of the gardening budget. The Lawn Institute shows itself aware that a concern for the environment has become an accepted feature of middle-class America’s social awareness, and makes the necessary adjustments to the message. Turf is hailed as ‘an environmental hero’, on the grounds that the lawn supposedly provides one person’s daily oxygen intake, helps cool the air, controls allergy-provoking dust and pollen, absorbs pollutants like carbon dioxide, nationally neutralizes twelve million tons of floating dust and dirt, filters water into groundwater supplies, acts as a buffer against pesticides, is a larder for birds and insects and prevents soil erosion.
So, the mantra goes, the lawn is good for our world, good for our health, good for us and for our children. But most of all, it is good for our property values. The Lawn Institute makes much of a Gallup poll defining the five perceived cardinal qualities:
1) Helps beautify the neighbourhood.
2) A place of beauty and relaxation for family, employees and visitors.
3) Reflects positively on owner.
4) Place of comfort for work and entertainment.
5) Adds to real estate value.
‘Attractive lawns’, the Institute says, ‘offer curbside appeal, which prompts potential home buyers to visit the inside of the home … Grass is perennial, so lawns are very durable investments.’
In the face of such an accretion of virtues, the sceptics face an uphill battle. Too many popu
lar aspirations, beliefs, superstitions and misconceptions are synthesized in the lawn for its status as an institution to be genuinely vulnerable. How can you argue effectively against something which looks nice, provides exercise and jobs, helps keep you and those dear to you and the world at large healthy – and enhances the value of your home? The combination is irresistible.
Then and Now – Greensward and Minimum Bovver
I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too well-tended lawn
W.H. HUDSON
Assaults such as Hudson’s did nothing to undermine the ascendancy which the lawn continued to enjoy as the serene assumptions of Victorian England merged into those of the Edwardian Age. Hudson saw his spiritual territory – the ancient downland, woodland and sweet valleys of England – threatened by the creeping spread of town and deadly, conforming suburbia. But few shared his fears. Little disturbed the benign complacency with which the Englishman viewed his lawn, and so much else. As he surveyed the world, contemplating how much of the best of it had the Union Jack flying over it, he saw ample evidence to support the central core of his belief: that in matters of climate, resources, geographical placement, character and temperament, his country and its people had been uniquely favoured.
In the matter of grass, the assumption was absolute. It was expressed in typical fashion in Reginald Blomfield’s The Formal Garden in England, published not long before the end of the 19th century: ‘The turf of an English garden is probably the most perfect in the world; certainly it is far more beautiful than any to be found on the Continent.’
Wrapped in their thick quilt of superiority, the British had no appetite for the missionary zeal taking root in America, nor did they feel any need to question the methods and traditions which served them so well. Grass seed mixtures remained much as they had been in Mrs Loudon’s day, and Mr Lamson-Scribner’s doctrine of racial purity never caught on. Instructions on how to lay down a lawn were faithful to the precepts stated by John James three centuries before. Writers tended to concern themselves with the impression of it, rather than the technicalities of it. Walter Godfrey addressed himself to the matter in his Gardens in the Making, which was published in 1914 (with a dedication to Mrs Illingworth Illingworth):
Green turf is the carpet with which we lay the broad spaces of our garden floor. Its presence near the house is one of the most essential conditions of a beautiful and reposeful plan. The grass path is a thing of quite unrivalled charm. It must be kept in the very pink of condition, soft and with the springiness of velvet, with edges trimmed with unerring straightness …
There was no need for Godfrey to tell Mrs Illingworth Illingworth how to achieve these effects. This could be safely left to our rain, softer and more nourishing than anyone else’s; our breezes, gentler and more beneficial; our sun, warming but never scorching; our mowers, the first, the best; and assorted sweating labourers, marshalled by a dependable head gardener, all reliant upon Mrs Illingworth Illingworth for shelter and the means to sustain existence.
Until the Great War, labour was cheap and readily available, and most of the gardening toil was done by paid help. The owner of the suburban residence or his wife might, if they were at all artistically inclined, organize the design, and lend a hand with some of the more agreeable tasks, pruning the roses, perhaps, or a spot of mowing. But it would not have occurred to them, any more than it would have done to the proprietors of the great country houses, to do other than leave the slog to the natural-born sloggers. Kipling made rough fun of this division in his poem ‘The Glory Of The Garden’:
Our England is a garden that is full of stately views
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing ‘Oh how beautiful’ and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel paths with broken dinner knives.
Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders.
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.
Oh Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees.
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away.
In Edwardian England, the idea of a member of the land-owning classes with an aching back, dirty knees or earth lodged beneath broken fingernails was unimaginable. The Englishman was still accustomed to stand at his drawing room window, look out over his terrace, his grass tennis court, his croquet lawn, the greensward around and about, the shrubberies and borders and stands of great trees, enclosed in thick, ivy-clad walls, and feel much as the Squire in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington had felt.
It is true that the social upheaval accompanying the Great War swept much of that old world away. The idyll pictured by Henry James, in which impossibly gracious members of the idle aristocracy disported themselves on sweeping lawns of infinite softness dating back to Cromwell’s time, nattering of love and literature, while the great unwashed went about its obscure, sordid business beyond the estate walls, could no longer be sustained. Too many people had died, too many lives had been shattered, too many of the survivors could testify to the horrors that mankind has visited upon itself. And, in practical terms, cheap labour was no longer available to keep those great gardens going.
On the other hand, the years of war did nothing to undermine the British passion for the garden, or the place of the lawn within it. If anything, the experience of conflict had intensified the yearning for the tranquillity and innocence which the garden symbolized. The garden, almost alone, had been unpolluted by the slaughter, devastation and cruelty. The trees and shrubs had matured, the flowers had bloomed, the lawns – well, at least they had not been laid waste. All was still there, looking a little ragged perhaps, but needing no more than care and attention to be restored to full health. Consolation and comfort were there, and with them a link, a spiritual chain, leading from the uncertain present to that previous, secure world.
Shortly after the war ended, a four-volume treatise, Practical Gardening for Pleasure and Profit, was published, under the editorship of a Mr W. Wright. He revelled in the supremacy of our turf:
Famed far beyond the confines of our tight little island are the lawns of England. Visitors from overseas look on these smooth swards of velvet verdure, and covet and admire. Sometimes, in order to keep in colour with the grass, they turn green – with envy.
One can imagine Mr Wright chuckling with delight at this extraordinarily feeble joke. The core of his beliefs was clearly formed in sun-kissed Edwardian days. But the experience of war inspired him to tack on a new, more democratic vision, of the British as a ‘nation of gardeners’. ‘What does this mean?’ he asks himself:
It means that the spectre of starvation has no terrors for us. Denial of luxury – yes! Restriction of titbits – perhaps! Actual want – no! It means health … it means education – not the pseudo-education of the schools but the true education which is based on the solid ground of nature … A nation of gardeners, then, is a nation of patriots … It is a virile, active, energetic nation. It has a sound mind in a sound body.
And that, Mr Wright might have added, means that, just as we lead the world in cultivating lawns, flowers and vegetables, so – when we are roused – do we administer a go
od thrashing on the battlefield to races inferior by reason of their exclusion from these character-forming blessings.
The post-war shortage of labour strengthened the grip on the public consciousness of the principle that no British garden was complete – or, indeed, was a garden at all – without a decent lawn. With the ranks of the labouring classes so thinned, many owners found themselves compelled to grass over areas of their gardens previously devoted to borders. Steady advances in mowing technology assisted the process. Although Ransomes had introduced the motor mower as long ago as 1902, in the early years it was available only in sizes suitable for sports grounds or great estates, and up to 1914 no more than six hundred had been sold. Gradually, petrol-driven mowers became more manageable and widely used – although the push mower retained its pre-eminent position in the market, and pony power continued to be exploited. Two factors which held back the growth in motor mowing were the high cost of the machines – in 1925 the Shanks 42-incher retailed at £335, the 35-incher at £280 – and their weight. Even a mower with 24-inch cutters weighed several hundredweight.
Other makers entered the market to dispute with Ransomes, Green and Shanks – among them Dennis Brothers of Guildford, Charles H. Pugh of Birmingham (the ‘Atco’) and JP Engineering of Leicester. As production increased – in 1928 JP sold more than twelve thousand machines – costs came down steeply. In 1930 the standard Atco 22-inch model was priced at £75, and by the mid-1930s Qualcast’s cheapest mower was less than £15.