by Tom Fort
Little by little, a more rigorous attitude to grass itself developed. The tolerance, indeed affection, of men like Shirley Hibberd for moss and clover gave way to a more exclusive identification of what did, and did not, properly belong in the well-tended lawn. In H. H. Thomas’s 1925 textbook, The Complete Amateur Gardener, clover was still permitted, but moss and daisies had become unwelcome intruders, to be suppressed by the use of lawn sand. The casts left by the garden’s universal and indefatigable resident, the earthworm, were also regarded as a blot on the lawn’s pure visage. Thomas suggested that, in moderation, they needed merely to be swept away. But where they abounded, worm killer was called for.
In 1931 the first book to be devoted exclusively to grass culture, Reginald Beale’s The Book of the Lawn, was published. It displays a distinct hardening in attitude. Its tone is authoritarian and illiberal, and its message is couched in terms infected with competitive and militaristic imagery. The lawn is seen as an arena for manly contest, or as a battlefield. The steps in its creation are described as the England cricket captain might present his plan for defeating the Australians, or a platoon commander his strategy for an impending offensive. Once the basics have been done – the site levelled, drained, cleared of stones and weeds, raked, sown, raked again, rolled, mowed, spiked, patched, and fertilized – attention is turned to the enemy.
Beale’s tactics owe more than a little to the lessons of the Great War. There is no place here for gentlemanliness, chivalry or generosity towards the adversary. The victor will be the one whose troops are the most thoroughly prepared, whose armaments are the most advanced and effective, whose vigilance is the most constant, and whose pursuit of the goal is the most ruthless.
The enemies are various and resourceful. Chief among the weeds is the common plantain, though the daisy is ‘one of the worst’. ‘It is essential’, Beale urges, ‘for the owner of a lawn to fight the weeds year in and year out … unless they are killed, they will win the battle.’ But you may not relax, even when the weeds are routed. They have allies, even more pernicious. There are moles, which must be gassed, using Brocks Port Fire. Ant nests must be opened and drenched – at whatever hazard to the lawn-keeper – with carbon disulphide, which is ‘highly inflammable and consequently dangerous’. The weapon against the vile leatherjacket – the grub of the daddy-longlegs, whose speciality is producing patches of brown, dead grass – is Kil-Jac, an application of which will leave the treated area ‘literally smothered in dead and dying grubs’.
But of all the lawn’s foes, one is to be feared and hated above all others:
Of the pests that attack turf the earthworm takes the premier position and undoubtedly does more damage than all the rest put together … The damage they do to mowing machines is beyond belief … they foul the turf … their slimy casts make wonderful seedbeds for weeds.
There is, the commander cries, but one way to combat such a pestilence: Worm Killer, and plenty of it.
The worms, large and small, struggle to the surface in thousands to die … the Worm Killer is absolutely infallible.
The drawback with lawn war, as opposed to human war, is that it cannot be pursued to total victory. Had a means been available to Reginald Beale to extirpate the worms and their allies, I suspect he would have taken it. As it is, the best the successful leader can hope for is to stay on top, depriving the other side of the means to regroup, ready to resume severe offensive operations if the circumstances demand. Beale remembered only too well what could happen if things were allowed to slide. On his own lawn, the Great War interrupted what had been twenty years of attritional control. While guns blazed and men perished on the battlefields of France, at home ‘the weeds won the game’.
Mowing was, of course, the primary means of keeping the upper hand in this continuous antagonism. The man responsible for it was like a prison governor, or the commanding officer of a garrison in conquered territory. For him, mowing was not a pleasant way to unwind after a busy week in the office. It was akin to going on manoeuvres, or laying a minefield, or strengthening fortifications:
On no account should the grass be allowed to grow over one inch long … The moment it is allowed to do so, it begins to deteriorate … The old-fashioned idea, prompted by laziness and ignorance, of putting the mower away between October and March, cannot be deprecated too seriously.
Sandwiched between Reginald Beale’s outbursts of martial fervour were slabs of perfectly sound advice on making and maintaining a lawn; and one suspects that most readers would have applied as much of that as they could be bothered with, and ignored the rhetoric. By the mid-1930s the means to achieve a decent lawn were easily and cheaply available. Sound scientific study was being carried out at the Bingley research centre near Bradford, which had been established in 1929, to produce advice on seed mixtures, fertilizers, weed treatments and the like. It was up to the gardener whether he or she wished to aspire to the velvet greensward, or was content with an expanse of imperfect, hard-wearing, pleasing turf. The evangelical message promoted so energetically in the United States secured few converts in Britain. With God, the British climate and the unsurpassable expertise of the British engineer on his side, the British gardener had no need of it.
So secure had the lawn become in the scheme of things since the time of Shirley Hibberd that later generations of designers and writers largely lost interest in it. Every concept began with a lawn, but there was nothing to say about it. Excitement and originality were provoked by more testing matters: of proportion and arrangement, the use and abuse of colour, the reconciliation of past and present, the exploitation of new hybrid varieties and the new species brought from China and Tibet. To be sure, there was grass within the Sackville-West gardens at Sissinghurst, and at Miss Jekyll’s Mumstead Wood; but the ladies hardly bothered to say how it got there. There was grass, perfect grass, spread around Sir Philip Sassoon’s paradise at Port Lympne; but it was no more than a backdrop, filling in the spaces between the flower-dense borders, the glistening fountain pool, the clipped yew hedges, the great stone staircase and the other elements in his rich and gorgeous conception.
As in America, the Second World War interrupted the march of the lawn. Many gardeners responded to the call to help feed the nation by digging up their lovingly cherished pieces of turf and converting them to vegetable plots. But with peace restored, the lawn quickly resumed its place as the garden’s sine qua non. As home ownership expanded, so did lawns multiply. Broadly speaking, people in Britain did not have to be convinced that the garden which came with their house should contain a lawn. They merely wished to be told how to do it.
Consequently, the blandishments of the British lawn care industry seem remarkably pallid, compared with the loud assertions of its American equivalent. An issue of the Gardener’s Chronicle of 1960 contains advertisements on behalf of four British mower manufacturers. The Atco is a ‘motor mower for life’. The Green ‘gives every lawn a close, even cut – a bowling green finish’. The Suffolk Punch is ‘unbeatable’. The Qualcast Super Panther has ‘sleek thoroughbred lines … looks bliss to use, proves bliss to use’. How restrained, how quaint, how so, so terribly English these encomiums are! There are no rousing military images, exhortations to conquer, control and exterminate, vulgar references to enhanced property values, no aggressive invocation of a male-dominated society. The implication behind these polite endorsements is that the British gardener does not need to be told what he needs the machine for, any more than he needs to be told that mowing is man’s work; and that he would be embarrassed by an appeal to him to assert his masculinity. The mowers are introduced as if they were candidates in a Parliamentary election. We know that they are good chaps and incapable of anything other than fair play; and merely wish to be informed about the specifications of the engine, the nature of the starting mechanism, the means by which the height of the cut can be adjusted.
The industry flourished. In 1954 Ransomes sold more than forty-two thousand push mowers, almost ten
thousand motor mowers, and more than a thousand of the gang mowers which had been developed in the United States for cutting golf fairways, and had become widely used on sports grounds and recreation fields. The ancient names of Green and Shanks survived, but in increasingly precarious competition with other more innovative and energetic manufacturers. The first rotary mowers had been developed in the 1930s, and the Shay Rotoscythe became extremely popular because of its ability to cope with long, rough grass to which the traditional cylinder machine was unsuited. The rotary principle was refined by companies like Hayter and Mountfield, and began to challenge the dominance of the traditional cylinder design.
In 1963 Flymo introduced the brainchild of the Swedish designer, Karl Dahlman. It was a rotary mower in which the cutter revolved over a cushion of air, and it revolutionized the practise of grass-cutting and the attitudes associated with it. The primary asset of the hover mower had nothing whatever to do with the quality of the finish it produced. Indeed, its triumph in the market place depended on consigning that notion to the steadily growing scrap heap of similarly redundant traditional values. This was the dawning of the age in which the white heat of technological advance would confer on the societies which embraced it an unimaginable abundance of leisure and comfort, liberating the new generation from those outmoded conventions which had so constricted the lives of their parents; among which the practice of expending several hours manhandling a weighty piece of metal up and down an expanse of grass until its shaven and striped demeanour corresponded with the accepted norm of excellence was but one.
The Flymo was cheap, light, as easy to manoeuvre as a toothbrush. The essence of its attractiveness – convenience – was in perfect harmony with the spirit of the times. All it lacked was the slogan, to light its fire. In a way, the genius which inspired ‘It’s a Lot Less Bovver With a Hovver’ was even more in tune with the age than Karl Dahlmann’s invention itself. Propelled by that bewitching ditty, the Flymo swept all before it, banishing the old ‘velvet sward’ ideal to the dustbin labelled sentimental, useless clutter of the past; where it joined bowler hats, steam engines, starched collars, suet puddings, split-cane fishing rods, cricket bats which needed oiling, English seaside holidays and much else besides.
Within a decade the ‘less bovver’ principle embodied in the Flymo had established dominance in the mass market. But competition being what it is, the product itself was challenged all the way, chiefly by Qualcast. Qualcast’s rival to the Flymo was its Concorde, a cheap, basic, mains-driven cylinder mower. The battle between them became one, not of their respective merits as pieces of grass-cutting machinery, but of the slogans. Here Qualcast resorted to means foul or brilliant, according to the perspective. ‘A Lot Less Bovver With a Hovver’ became ‘A Lot Less Bovver Than a Hovver’, a minimalist verbal adjustment exposing a world of difference. It enabled Qualcast to scrap with the orange champion on something approaching level terms, until the moment the hover patent expired, whereupon Qualcast leaped aboard the bandwagon.
Other factors were at work, helping elbow the traditional striped lawn and its attendant petrol and push mowers to the margins. As pressure upon building land intensified, and outlets for leisure multiplied, so did lawns shrink. By 1989 more than one third of Britain’s sixteen million or so lawns were smaller than thirty-eight square yards, and a mere tenth covered a hundred square yards or more. Increasingly, home-owners found that they did not want anything more from the patch of coarse grass, moss and weeds which they called the lawn than that their children should be able to play football on it, and that it should be passably tidy. And they found that the small, light, cheap, easily maintained, mass-produced grass-cutter answered well enough.
No longer valued, most of the great names of mower craftsmanship perished. Green, Shanks, Webb, JP, vanished. Ransomes bid farewell to the domestic garden to concentrate on the golf course and sports field market, and marked its bicentenary by falling into American ownership. Dennis disappeared from Guildford. Among the smaller companies, Alletts of Arbroath has survived, as has Lloyds of Letchworth still producing its incomparable Paladin. The market today is ruled by a handful of mass producers: Qualcast-Atco (part of the Robert Bosch Group), Black and Decker, Honda and Flymo.
Against such a background, it is clear any notion that a majority of British householders share a passion for, or enthusiasm for, or indeed lively interest in, the lawn is unsustainable. But nor, statistically, are we a nation of gardeners – as we are undoubtedly a nation of supermarket shoppers, car owners and television watchers. The majority of the residents in the village where I live – a large, straggling, wholly unpicturesque Home Counties settlement – are not gardeners in any meaningful sense. The plots in which the majority of the houses stand are not gardens, but spaces. There may be a few mediocre shrubs struggling for life in the impoverished sub-soil with which the developer cloaked his discarded rubble and rubbish; a straggly tree or two of unknown species; a weed-stuffed strip which was once a flower bed. And there is grass, which the home-owner – preferring not to confront a wilderness when he steps outside the door and having no clue what else he might do with the space – cuts with a cheap motor mower when the mood takes him or the pressure becomes irresistible. He has no affection for the stuff, nor concern for its welfare.
So, no, we are not a nation of lawn lovers or gardeners. But nor should the scale of the triumph of the ‘minimum bovver’ principle be exaggerated. Alongside the great majority of the uninterested, there are the four, five, six million of us who – while not necessarily calling ourselves gardeners – would own up to a curiosity about and active involvement in some aspect of what goes on in the place we call the garden. For the majority among this considerable constituency, the care of the lawn would probably be regarded in neutral terms, as one of a number of necessary tasks, or as a bothersome chore. But there is a considerable minority in whom cultivated grass arouses emotions ranging from mild affection through warm enthusiasm to consuming passion. To see them, you must go to the gardening centre in spring, as their grass comes to life. They will be surveying the shelves of weed exterminators, humping sacks of moss-killer and fertilizer, scrutinizing the beguiling promises on boxes of seed, looking longingly at the ranks of glistening green mowers, thumbing attentively through the pages of manuals of instruction. The size of the minority is a matter of speculation. But it is big enough to justify garden centres devoting more space to lawn care products than to any other branch of the pastime. Gather them together, and they would make an impressive army of consumers.
Forty years and more ago, Marjery Fish wrote in her classic account of a horticultural love affair, We Made a Garden: ‘The four essentials of a good garden are perfect lawns, paths, hedges and walls.’ And she observed of her husband and partner: ‘Walter would no more have left his grass uncut or his edges untrimmed than he would have neglected to shave.’ Standards have certainly slipped since those innocent days – I myself sometimes do the mowing unshaven. But, in the mightily conservative, tradition-heavy world of the British garden, the place of Marjery Fish’s fundamentals has remained pretty secure; that of the lawn wholly so. Most people in charge of anything bigger than the smallest town or cottage garden simply cannot imagine it without cultivated grass. The lawn is as essential to the garden as the roof to the house.
Efforts to dislodge it from its position of eminence have proved largely futile. Bleatings about the supposed tyranny it exercises from time to time escape the writers and designers, who are fond of calling it a shibboleth. A more concentrated anti-lawn movement arose a few years ago, inspired by the droughts of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made most expanses of grass look as if they had been attacked with a flame-thrower. With verdant velvet transformed into crisp beige, and the airwaves alive with nonsense about the coming of Britain’s ‘Mediterranean-style climate’, the country’s favourite ground cover seemed briefly under threat. At least one of the big water companies suggested that customers distressed by the co
ndition of their lawns should dig them up, and replace them with artificial grass. Daring gardening journalists suggested paving or coloured chippings, or a wild flower meadow better able to retain moisture. Mower sales declined – partly because parched brown lawns do not require mowing. ‘Is the great British love affair with the lawn over?’ one or two provocative scribes asked. A couple of damp summers, green as of old, provided the answer.
Gardening, like cooking, exists on two planes: one largely fabulous, the other more or less real. The first is inhabited by professionals – chattering television presenters, wacky designers, plantsmen and plantswomen steeped in botanical Latin, newspaper columnists skilled in the art of dressing up as new the same old wisdom that they’ve been dishing out at the same time each season since the year dot. The second is occupied by the garden outside the back door, with its stony, lumpy soil, its rampant ground elder and couch grass, its unweeded borders, its unpruned, diseased, clapped-out rose bushes, its aphid-ravaged raspberries, caterpillar-chewed gooseberries and slug-wasted brassicas; the evidence it presents in every corner of neglect mitigated by short-lived bursts of activity.
The great army of practical gardeners will dabble in the first plane. They will skim the gardening pages in the newspapers, watch the TV programmes, nod with interest when the experts whose livelihoods depend on having something ‘lively’ and ‘provocative’ to say advocate replacing the tedious lawn with pond, patio or the current favourite flavour, wood decking. They may visit famous gardens, or go to Chelsea, and come back with an idea or two: put in a fountain, install a pergola, make an arbour.