by Tom Fort
Professor Beloff was an observer, rather than a campaigner. She admitted quite contentedly that she and her husband, another psychologist, corresponded precisely to the gender patterns. He did the mowing, and would not – she assumed – want her to do it. This suited her, as she had no interest in it, and was sufficiently occupied training plants and weeding.
I asked the wives of two fairly extreme examples of the lawn-mowing zealot how they viewed the passion. Each said she liked ‘a good lawn’, on condition that she had nothing to do with making it so. Neither had any interest whatever in grass culture. One said her husband wouldn’t have considered letting her mow, because of the assumption – which she seemed to share – that she wouldn’t be capable of getting the lines straight. The other said she had no desire at all to perform a task which was so noisy and dirty and energetic, and which required whoever did it to come to lunch with hands stinking of Swarfega. Both used the word ‘harmless’ to characterize the activity. Both commended it on the grounds that it was better than going to the pub, and that it could not be done in the pub. I did not have the nerve to ask either of them if it had crossed their minds that it might be a substitute for sex, and therefore probably worse than going to the pub.
By this stage I was feeling a trifle insecure in my allegiance to the lawn. Was it – far from being an innocent enthusiasm – a symptom of a sinister desire for sexual penetration and for furthering the cause of male domination? I felt I needed to talk to a kindred spirit – a man, of course, but one who might give me an alternative, more reassuring version of the lawnsman’s compulsion. So I telephoned the novelist, Jim Crace, to ask him about his lawn.
Anyone who has read Quarantine or any of Crace’s other novels will know that he does not shun the dark places; rather that they are his preferred territory, to be explored with prose like a diamond cutter. I had never met him, but I had read a newspaper profile of him which contained an admiring reference to the quality of his greensward. Over the telephone he established his credentials as a lawnsman at once, by insisting that his turf was in a poor way and that the hack who had praised it knew nothing of such matters. All he could see, he said, were the fallen apples, the patches of discolouring from a bitch’s urine, the sprouting of plantains and the insidious spread of moss – all this being the kind of thing lawnsmen always say.
It had come, he explained, from his father, who had worked as a groundsman, tending cricket squares, bowling greens and grass tennis courts. His father had been jealous of his turf; so much so that, on seeing a glider pilot circling overhead looking for somewhere to land, he had distributed machinery across the mown expanses to persuade the fellow to put to earth somewhere else. Crace told me that at the age of seventeen, he had crashed the family car not far from home, and had been ordered by his mother to bring the dreadful news to his father, who was cutting the lawn. Covered in blood, the youth stammered out his confession. ‘All right, all right,’ his father replied. ‘Now get off the grass.’
At the Crace home there were two lawns, front and back. The role of the front lawn, much the smaller, was as a statement of respectability, for only philanderers neglected their front lawns. It was at the back, away from passing eyes, that his father – Webb mower in hand – observed the full rituals. I asked if he had ever wondered about the origin of the impulse. Crace thought it sprang from a deeply imprinted desire to control and domesticate nature. It was, he agreed, a purely masculine province, legitimized by being distinct from housework. There was no sympathy between him and his wife on the matter, he said. To him, the edges of the lawn were of vital importance, requiring that he kneel and use a pair of scissors to preserve and enhance their sculpted precision. Yet she, partner in a perfect marriage, would put her foot on that edge and squash it down, in Crace’s words ‘totally unacceptable behaviour, divorceable’; and worse, abandon across the emerald sward little mounds of decomposing weeds and tools, blighting its complexion.
Crace talked more about his father; how the care of the lawn and the allotment had been stitched into his apprehension of the family and its shared life; how, when slowly dying, he had striven to continue in the discharge of those duties. Crace had watched, and when his father could no longer mow the grass, the son had taken charge. And here was one explanation – ‘I started turning into my father.’
PART THREE
The Lawnsmen
To insure the luxury of a ‘velvet lawn’ is, to speak generally, a most easy matter
JAMES SHIRLEY HIBBERD
Armed with the gospel according to the good Doctor Hessayon, I went forth into battle, my mission to transform the unkempt, weed-infested, moss-thick patches at the front and to the back of our house into orthodox lawns. I had attempted this sort of thing before, but long ago. And I had forgotten two things: firstly, how much time and effort is required to treat even the smallest expanse of ground; and, secondly, how many of gardening’s most tedious, wearying and repetitive tasks are concentrated on the business of making a lawn. The Doctor omits to mention that. I strongly suspect that he left the toil to someone else.
I began on the front lawn. Here, for many years before our purchase of the house, the grass had been engaged in a hopeless battle against the moss, conducted in the shadow of two towering conifer trees which prevented any sunlight from penetrating. We had the trees cut down, and I applied a solution of ferro-sulphate which turned the moss from a vital green to a sinister black. Then I took up a wire rake and attacked it. The curious thing about raking moss is that, however much you remove, however many barrowfuls of the soft, downy stuff that you consign to the bonfire, as much remains; until, having been over the same piece of ground five times, you discover that there can never have been any grass there in the first place because the moss has now gone and all that is left is bare, lacerated earth.
At the back, different problems presented different challenges. There was grass, albeit somewhat rough and weedy, which I left to its own devices in order to prepare for seeding two areas from which we had removed the tangled remains of ancient shrubbery. This clearance work had been done in a flush of enthusiasm some months earlier. Now, as I dug over the ground, I found that it had been incomplete. There was a mass of shallow roots left behind, pale in appearance, of a strange, elastic consistency. I assaulted them energetically, until I had reached the edge of the existing lawn. I found that these roots had no respect for such boundaries. They had crept off beneath the turf, the yellowish tentacles thrusting through the fibrous root system of the grass. Moreover, at various points far distant from where the original tree had stood, they had sent up suckers, like outposts left by a colonizing power. These were marked by little clumps of fern-like leaves, strikingly vigorous in their growth, considering their isolation from the extirpated mother tree.
As I pursued the tentacles through the grass, like a Jesuit of the Inquisition on the trail of an insidious heresy, I developed a righteous hatred of the plant. The emotion was far more powerful than the gardener’s normal antipathy towards ground elder, ivy, moss and other endemic nuisances. I felt there was something horrible, almost obscene about this growth, its sneaky mode of operation, its irrepressible vitality. On my knees I wrestled with it, until what had previously been an expanse of admittedly mediocre lawn looked as if it had been invaded by an army of worm-starved badgers and hooligan moles; and as I did so, I invested my enemy with the quality of evil, and appointed myself as the agent of virtue.
I wanted to know my enemy, and so I described it to my mother, who knows most things about the plant world. She said it sounded like a sumach. I looked it up in the encyclopaedia, and there it was: Rhus typhina, the Stag’s Horn Sumach. It was described as a popular ornamental tree, celebrated for the beauty of its reddened foliage in autumn. Beyond a passing reference to the wandering habits of its root system making it an unsuitable companion for a lawn, there was no hint of its wickedness. I watched the smoke rising from the tangled mound of its offspring on my bonfire, with the grim s
atisfaction of the Witchfinder General at a public burning.
It was time to prepare the ground for seeding – the work of an afternoon, I reckoned, or perhaps a day at most. So I dug over the ground again, removing a surprising quantity of lesser weeds, which took one afternoon. I levelled it as best I could by eye, and edged the patch with strips of wood to prevent encroachment, which took another. I then raked it about a thousand times with the metal-toothed rake, removed a ton or so of stones by hand, and finally stamped it firm, which took a week’s worth of afternoons.
To me, it now looked ready. But a sudden guilt possessed me, for, amid all this activity, I had omitted to consult the gospel according to the Doctor. When I did so, I was seized with shame. I found that my adherence to the liturgy had been, at best, incomplete, while several stages regarded as essential to the creation of the Beautiful Lawn I had overlooked altogether. The levelling should have been organized with a system of pegs with lines painted on them, a seven-foot straight-edged board and a spirit level, whereas I had merely squinted at the site, thrown a few spadefuls of earth around, squinted again, distributed a bit more earth, until it ‘looked about right’. I had entirely neglected to investigate the drainage situation, and had failed to ‘work in at least twenty-eight pounds of lime-free sand per square yard when digging’. I had not applied Paraquat to destroy perennial weeds, nor did my strategy permit the necessary fallow period for any surviving weeds to reveal themselves, and be destroyed. Finally, I had shirked the dragging of the screed over the loosened surface to create the perfect tilth in which my seed might flourish.
In short, I had shown myself to be a most unworthy disciple. The pressing question was: should I, could I, mend my ways? Should what had been left undone continue to be left undone, or be done? In theory, it was not too late to start again. I knew, in my heart, that my besetting sins in gardening, as in all other aspects of home maintenance and improvement, were to start doing something before I was ready, to fail to do it properly, and to refuse to go back and do it again. And my punishment was to regret that I had ever thought of doing it in the first place. So I looked at that patch of earth, and studied the word of the Doctor, and looked at the earth again. And my heart failed me. I took up the box of grass seed, and I cast that seed upon the ground.
Down on the south coast, where the finger of the Beaulieu estuary pokes deep into the New Forest, I found a scattering of long, low, smart bungalows, discreetly half-hidden among the oaks and beeches. The road went nowhere, and vividly un-English ornamental pheasants pecked in peace at its side. The soil here is thin and acid. When Alan Andrews, retired master baker of Barnet, migrated here from north London, they told him he would not have to mow more than twice a year, so wretched and unprofitable was the struggle of grass to grow. And, indeed, all but one of the homes in this clearing in the forest stood on impoverished rashes of moss, scraggy tufts of grass and bare earth.
Mr Andrews was of a family to whom gardening and gardens mattered. His father was a passionate nurturer of blooms, ever anxious to best his neighbours for colour and luxuriance, commonly to be found at breakfast studying a volume concerning propagation or pruning. Gardening was an essential element of Alan Andrews’s strategy for retirement. He could not imagine the one without the other. When he and his wife migrated from north London to their new house, he found that the area around it, referred to by the builders as its landscaped gardens, was no garden at all, but an expanse of dust and stones dropping away to the forest, into which a few dull and doomed shrubs had been hurriedly dropped. He ordered top soil of the best quality, two hundred tons of it, and his new neighbours murmured their disapproval as the lorries bringing it roared up the private road they shared. Mr Andrews commanded that the slope be civilized into a brace of terraced flats, in each of which borders would enclose level lawns. The turf came and was unrolled and cut to shape; and the beds were mulched and manured; and the species of plants that Mr and Mrs Andrews liked and trusted were tenderly consigned to their ordained places.
Unlike his father, Alan Andrews had no need to compete with anyone, for no one around had ambitions to match his. Nor did he much care – or if he did, he kept it to himself – when, in that osmotic way so characteristic of communities of the retired and the retiring, it was made known to him that his concept of an Englishman’s garden was considered rather ‘suburban’ for the sylvan setting. His spiraeas and his berberis, his brooms and hebes, his elaeagnus, escallonias and fuchsias, were all essential components in his mental picture of what he intended to be his last home. He was not minded to sacrifice them on the altar of provincial prejudice.
He was in his mid-seventies, a man of medium height, with a sliver of a silver moustache, a hearing aid and an evident enthusiasm for his life; Rotarian, church-goer, ex-village hall treasurer, contemptuous of those who would not bother to enter into the life of the little village of Beaulieu, perched beside the reedy waters of the estuary. As we strolled through the garden (there was no invitation to go inside, and why should there have been) he told me that he and Mrs Andrews did not care for weeds. Nor do I, but in my garden there are plenty. In Mr Andrews’s I scarcely saw one. The two lawns were as flat as tables, cut evenly but not short, the fine-leaved grass in easy ascendancy over the occasional dab of clover or daisy. But there were dark smears, trails of an invader. Mr Andrews and his wife do not care for wildlife any more than weeds, except the varieties that leave the garden alone. Deer and moles they dislike particularly; and these, unmistakeably, were the signs of molish questing for worms, as welcome to Mr Andrews as a dead mouse would have been in one of his loaves of bread. His wife, he told me as if it were the most normal thing in the world, would go out at night armed with a torch and a garden fork, and stab the creatures as they tunnelled. From this mild, courteous, godly man, this struck me as a little chilling.
Possibly in reaction to his father’s enthusiasm for the blaze of colour, Mr Andrews’s garden is a statement of sober, middle-class decency, a meticulously maintained, intricately ordered display of restrained harmony, the tropical burst of the bougainvillaea in the conservatory the one touch of the showman. He mows twice a week with his faithful Ransomes Marquis, applies fertilizer and weedkiller in the prescribed fashion, says with a little shrug that there’s nothing much to it if you don’t let things get out of hand. Apart from the vandalism of the moles, the turf was in wonderful condition for so early in the summer; and would become much finer still, in time for Mr Andrews to do what he does most years, scoop the prizes in the annual Beaulieu Horticultural Society competition. He is faintly bemused by the lack of interest shown by other society members in the matter of lawns. For him, it is simply an indispensable. He would no more live without a good lawn than he would have a house without a front door.
When Alan Andrews looks out of his window on to his little kingdom, he likes it to be as it should be. He admits, with a stifled noise midway between a laugh and cough, that he is distressed if something is amiss: a weed in a border, a shrub with brown-tinged leaves, a stalk of meadow grass on the lawn. He will not rest until the matter is dealt with. He likes his sharp edges, his straight lines, his neat borders, his well-ordered shrubs; and the forest beyond kept in its place, its anarchic licence at a safe distance. And I would surmise that nothing short of war, pestilence or irreversible infirmity would keep this decent and determined Englishman from his garden.
An Englishman of another type: Denis Burles, ex-RAF, late sixties, six foot three, bluff, business-like, perfectly friendly, but not the sort of chap you would dream of calling by his Christian name at first meeting. As befits a Lawn Doctor, he greets me with a corer in his hand: ‘An invaluable tool,’ he explains, for furnishing a cross-section of your turf. He lives with an unseen Mrs Burles on the outskirts of Abingdon, in a large house dating, I would guess, from the 1950s, surrounded by a large garden whose juxtaposition of lawn, border, gravel, shrubbery and mature trees is immediately and unmistakeably ‘English’ in its character, though
I would be hard-pressed to explain exactly why or how.
He beseeched me not to look at his lawn, a most English species of diffidence, given that I had come on lawn business. It was, he said, not as he would wish it, for he had been too busy to get down to the necessary scarifying. Needless to say, it looked splendid, as flat as a tennis court (which was what it was laid down for), and glowing with health. Mr Burles is tremendously, insistently sensible about grass. He admires the usefulness of ryegrass, tolerates the odd patch of meadow grass, is indulgent towards daisies and clover, has nothing against moss in moderation, and reserves his hostility for plantains and their uncouth cousins. He has, in his work, seen and experienced the lawns of fantasy and perfection. He told me, in wonder, of the pure fescue lawn planted beside the Palumbo residence in Berkshire, bluish in tinge, soft as silk to the touch and rather more delicate, prodigiously demanding of care and the spending of money; an indulgence, he implied, for a plutocrat with a foreign-sounding name.
He is a judge of lawns and their owners, equating his work with political canvassing, of which he has done his share (for the true blue, I would hazard, but I would not dream of asking). He has learned, he says, to make judgements on his way to the front door, based on the situation and quality of the house, the care evidently given, or not, to the garden, the availability of light, the prevailing winds, the nature of the soil. The appearance and demeanour of the client completes the equation, and he knows where to start.