The Grass is Greener

by Tom Fort

  He has a quiet disdain for men who ask him, as if he were a plumber, to transform a paddock into a velvet sward in time for their daughter’s wedding ten days hence; who inquire if he has heard of that ‘magic grass’ from Canada guaranteed to produce perfection in a trice. It is an article of faith with such a man that a decent lawn cannot be, as it were, plucked from a shelf. To make it, there is a tried and tested combination of elements: soil made ready, seed of the proper kind, applications of fertilizer and weedkiller, and so on. Then there must be work, regular work: mowing, weed removal, scarifying, etc., etc. There should be nothing obsessive about this; it should be a ‘working’ lawn, for an Englishman to play English games like cricket, football, croquet, tennis, with his wife and family and friends he has known so long that it would take an effort to recall the circumstances in which he met them.

  For such a man as Mr Burles, there are no easy ways, no shortcuts. Something worth having – a home, a wife, a business, a lawn – makes demands, otherwise it is not worth having. That is why Mr Burles mows two or three times a week (little and often, never cutting more than an eighth of the length of the grass, leaving the cuttings to lie to provide necessary food); why he was about to scarify when I saw him; why he submits himself to this regime of insistent demands on his time and energy, which Mrs Burles does not understand and rather resents (because he is rarely available to assist in the work of the borders and shrubberies), while naturally being rather proud of the result because of the way it sets off everything else.

  It goes without saying that this lawn, being English, will accommodate immigrants benignly, as long as they behave themselves and follow the rules. Moss, clover, lower forms of grass life, are fine – as long as they know their place and keep it. But they must be restrained in their natural impulse to take over, to alter the essential character. And he is ruthless with what he terms the ‘CBL’ – common broad-leaved weeds – such as plantains and dandelions. They are wholly anti-social types, spreading horizontally, breeding promiscuously, killing the grass beneath their wide fleshy leaves. They are poisoned without pity. But at the same time, he disapproves of fanaticism as much as licence. He has no time for those who seek to exterminate earthworms because their casts are unsightly, nor for the wasters of water with their emerald patches steaming in midsummer heat while the rivers run dry.

  For a lawn in England to be a true lawn, it must have its stripes, light and dark; so Dennis Burles is, of necessity, a cylinder mower man. In his shed, among the sacks of fertilizer, weedkiller, pest controller and seed, stands the essential machinery: scarifier, hollow and solid tiner (for perforating compacted ground), rotary mower (for the rough stuff out of sight), push mower (for the little patches), and his prop and staff, an eight-blade Lloyds Paladin. Mr Burles is not one to wax sentimental about a machine, to call it ‘she’ and ascribe moods and characteristics to it. But it is clearly more to him than just a tool for a purpose. The relationship is perhaps akin to that between farmer and workhorse, permitting a brusque affection while sanctioning the knacker’s yard. He cleans his Paladin and maintains it with care, because without that it would not work properly. But it would no more occur to him to prettify it, to restore the crimson of the cutters or the rich green of the bodywork than it would to the farmer to tie a pink ribbon in Dobbin’s halter. To Dennis Burles the beauty of a machine and its usefulness are indivisible. The capacity of this mower to do the job better than anything else around, thirty or forty years after its manufacture, is the sole justification for its pride of place in his shed.

  As I was leaving, he told me he was intending to cease practising as a lawn doctor. He was weary of the travelling, he said, and of the unreal demands of people with grass but no understanding of its ways. He wanted more time for his own garden. I speculated that what he had identified as a gap in the horticultural marketplace had proved to be much more demanding and less lucrative than he had hoped. I left him to his scarifying, pretty sure that he and his Paladin would be keeping each other company, master behind machine, keeping that decent bit of lawn in decent order, while there was strength in those long legs, and an edge to those burnished cutters.

  I knew of Ransomes and Dennis, and something of Green, and Shanks, and Atco and the rest, among which Lloyds of Letchworth was but another name. But actually, when I thought about it, I knew a little more than that. I have a passion for fishing, and in my boyhood my hero had been Britain’s pre-eminent angler, Richard Walker, who – when not stalking record carp, plotting the downfall of giant roach, or producing another instalment in an incomparably provocative stream of newspaper articles and books – worked as technical director for Lloyds. His mother, the legendary Mrs E. M. Walker (no first names, please) had joined the company as a clerk in her twenties when it was a mere importer of American equipment, and had risen to take control of it and direct it towards making lawn mowers instead of just dealing in them, remaining as chairman and managing director until she was nearly ninety. The Walkers, mother and brilliantly inventive son, are long gone. But the company survives and seems quietly to thrive, one of those unsung places where forty years of service is nothing exceptional; which stays small because that’s the way they like it; where a fierce, silent pride in traditional notions of craftsmanship and good service means that their quiet claim to make the best lawn mower in the world cannot seriously be challenged.

  You need to know nothing of the Paladin’s high-carbon chromium steel blades, its spring-actuated plate clutches, its jockey wheel tensioner nor any of its other one hundred and one specifications to appreciate that it is a thoroughbred. There is nothing fancy or flashy about it; men paying £3,000 plus for a machine to cut the grass would not want that. It is sound, solid, splendid, not needing to pretend to be what it is not, being the best. You feel that Edwin Beard Budding, having recognized it as the child of his mind, would have thrilled with pride.

  Denis Burles’s was the first Paladin I had ever seen. The second was in James Rothery’s garden shed, and it had on it not a blade of old grass, not the merest smear of earth. Mr Rothery told me, as if he were communicating the most mundane piece of information, that he washed it after each use – not cleaned it with an oily cloth and gave it a brush down, but washed it. I asked him how often he cut the grass. Oh, two or three times a week, he replied with a slightly unnerving smile. The rest of his equipment was in equally pristine condition. It included an electric edger, the latest in its field and as quiet as a razor, and a Jacobsen Greens King ride-on mower, a new model of which retailed at around £18,000. I became aware that Mr Rothery’s relationship with his grass was one of unusual intensity.

  I had actually met him for the first time a couple of hours earlier, in what had been until recently the car park of the Wednesfield Conservative Club on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. This area Mr Rothery and his workforce were transforming into a Crown Bowling green. I knew nothing about this sport. It was explained to me that it was played with keen competitive enthusiasm by some three and a half thousand clubs spread over an area stretching from Carnforth in the north to Coventry in the south, and from Llandudno in the west almost to Huddersfield in the east. Like its southern cousin, flat-green bowls, it is played on the turf of the finest, smoothest quality man’s ingenuity and labour can produce. Its distinguishing feature is that the centre of the green is raised a foot above the level of the periphery, providing a slope which the Crown Greeners stoutly maintain makes their game even more demanding of skill than the flat earth variety.

  Mr Rothery had never, as far as I could tell, played either game, and certainly had no interest in them. What had engaged his attention – first as a diversion, latterly as a business – was the nature of the green itself. To make an area of anything between 660 and 1,000 square yards perfectly flat, and grow upon it perfect turf, are no easy matters. To engineer an expanse of grass with a minute, mathematically uniform slope from the centre requires a scientific mind of some distinction, which Mr Rothery clearly has. As I h
ave not, I could not really follow his exposition of the techniques involved, in which readings furnished by some sort of laser machine of his own devising played a central part. So I watched his men putting down the layer of blinding sand which, in the profile of the green, is sandwiched between the drainage stones and the upper root zone, the mixture of fine sand and loam which supports and sustains the cloth of the finest bents and fescues required for the bowls to roll true. The Wednesfield Conservative Club green was intended to be ready for use in the first year of the new millennium (actually they were playing on it by the end of the last season of the old one). It took little effort of the imagination to see the members in their ties and short-sleeved shirts and soft shoes and pressed trousers bending to their play, and hear the click of the balls and the murmurs of appreciation for this fine amenity.

  Thirteen years before, Mr Rothery had, mainly by himself, constructed a rather larger green in front of his house in Cheshire. That is easily written, but the magnitude of the undertaking and the nature of the impulse to do it are hard to comprehend. The ostensible explanation – offered to me by Mr Rothery in a manner suggesting that he had no real expectation of it being believed – was that his wife loved bowling, and that this has been a gift to her. It was as if he had said that he had dug her a swimming pool by hand because she was a keen swimmer, or an Olympic-sized lagoon because she enjoyed sculling, or had created a replica of Epsom because she adored flat-racing. Mrs Rothery had never played on her personal bowling green for the very obvious reason that she was a member of a club with its own green, which competed in a league of clubs with their own greens.

  So there it lies, a perfect square of improbably smooth, fine-leaved turf, spiritually isolated from the rest of the garden, like a private place of worship; a place where a single devotee pursues his rituals; a monument, not to its dedicatee, but the frankly admitted obsession of its creator with the stuff, grass. Mr Rothery is in no way ashamed of, nor embarrassed by, his passion, although he makes no real attempt to put it into words, and clearly expects himself to be regarded, on its account, as a little outside the normal. Asked about it, he says that he can remember, as a boy, clamouring to be allowed to mow. It just went on from that, he says, and he smiles as he admits – or boasts – that he can bore for Britain on the subject. Pressed, he searches for a touch of the romantic, a little beyond the technicalities, and comes up with something about the smell of cut grass.

  On the day of my visit, he was in agony over the condition of the place of worship. Almost unceasing rain in spring had made it impossible for him to get on it to provide the pampering it needed to be anywhere near its best. He had not been able to scarify it properly, which meant that the vigour of spring growth had been inhibited by the profusion of thatch. Its colour was pallid, like the complexion of a child kept too long indoors. It wanted feeding and warm sunshine. Worst of all, to one side something had gone badly wrong with the system of pipes laid to drain excess water into the enclosing ditch. The ground was like a quaking bog, and had been invaded by rampant moss, which had discoloured it like some malignant disease.

  Clearly discomfited by his ailing green, Mr Rothery took me to his shed. Stimulated by my admiration for his Paladin, he embarked upon a detailed account of how he had come by it, in succession to a Ransomes Auto Certies via a dalliance with an Atco Club so unsatisfactory that the managing director of Atco had issued a personal apology for the machine’s shortcomings. I told him a little about Dennis Burles’s philosophy of lawn tolerance, but Mr Rothery was thoroughly unimpressed. The notion that mowing should be done without the box, to allow the clippings to nitrogenize the turf, clearly struck him as doctrinally unsound. Earthworms and their casts he regarded as pernicious. When I asked him how he got rid of them, he smirked mysteriously and would say no more than ‘I have my means’.

  Around the house were arranged conventional lawns intersected by precise little paths enclosing borders and shrubberies. The divisions between sward – no nonsense about ‘working lawns’ here – and flower beds were as sharply defined as if they had been drawn with a fine nib. There were few flowers in the borders. ‘Let’s have a look at James’s greenhouses,’ Mr Rothery said, puzzlingly. Under the glass were serried ranks of bedding plants, their foliage and blossom beaded with droplets, their luxuriance moist testimony to the efficacy of the system of irrigation and temperature control refined by their proud owner. ‘I’ll be putting out four and a half thousand of them in a few weeks,’ he said, as if they were toy soldiers.

  As I left, he drew my attention to a minute patch of yellowing in the rich emerald of one of the lawns. ‘Pearlwort,’ he said ferociously. ‘I’ve killed it.’ He crouched. ‘Look, here’s another bit.’ I looked, and identified a brushstroke of deeper green, a tangle of tiny leaves creeping around among the bents and fescues. ‘I’ll kill that next,’ he said. ‘I always have a knife in my pocket – you never know when you’re going to come across a weed.’

  Earlier, he had told me how the locals occasionally lobbed rocks and bits of metal over his high hedges on to his grass, presumably in the hope of disabling one of his machines. Mr Rothery attributed this urge to despoil to common envy for the superior being and his superior creation. But I wondered if it were not more akin to the destructive impulse of the Mongols of old, who, riding bareback out of the East, found towns and cities and razed them to the ground, because they did not understand the concept of a home.

  If James Rothery might be seen as representing Puritanism in lawn cultivation, and Dennis Burles the broad church, then Bill Deedes is the prophet of the permissive tendency. ‘I like my lawn uneven,’ he says, regarding it indulgently. ‘Why should I want a perfect lawn? I don’t live in a stately home.’ It’s true, although once his family owned Saltwood Castle, on whose lawns the subsequent proprietor, the late Alan Clark, liked to be photographed mounted on a beast of a ride-on mower. Now, Lord Deedes’s home is a stone-fronted Victorian farmhouse clad in creeper and climbing rose, with a path outside whose flags are worn and cracked and infiltrated by weeds; a solid, spacious, comfortable sort of a place for an elderly gentleman to return to from his wanderings, and warm his backside by the old Aga.

  It lies on the edge of a Kentish village, where Erasmus once had the living, though the theologian’s inability to speak a word of English inhibited his communion with his parishioners; and where a servant girl known as the Maid of Kent claimed to have had visions of the Virgin, until Cranmer forced her to recant and had her hanged at Tyburn. Very properly, Lord Deedes regards himself as a Kentishman, and is proud of it, although these days he is probably as familiar a figure in Albania or Sudan as he is on his home territory. At eighty-seven, he observes a discipline of work that would be considered taxing for one half his age, alternating between daily commuting to the Daily Telegraph’s offices in east London and hopping around the world’s most horrendous troublespots, reporting on the agonies of the oppressed with unfailing compassion and insight. When I caught up with him, he was weekending at home for the first time in months, taking a brief breather at the height of the Kosovo horror, preparing for his imminent departure to the refugee camps of northern Albania. As he acknowledged without any sign of regret, the garden had to pay the price for his absence.

  He gave me a cool, nutty beer from Kent’s brewery, Shepherd Neame, and himself drank pink gins as he talked of the Kosovo war, forecasting (with impressive accuracy, as it turned out) that the Yugoslav capitulation would come within a few weeks. It was not easy to turn him from the subject of man’s inhumanity to man to that of his grass. At length we went outside, and he showed me a paddock adjoining the garden, where the grass was supposed to kept down by a flock of fleeced foragers, except that they were not numerous enough or hungry enough to do the job properly. In his shed, a somewhat dilapidated structure, was assembled a collection of machines in a condition that would have given James Rothery nightmares, including a defunct Ransomes Marquis and a Toro recycling rotary mower clogged w
ith old grass and decomposing leaves. He spotted the gardener escorting a beaten-up Honda rotary, and chided him for preferring such an unrefined creature.

  Deedes himself properly scorns the circling blade. He is a cylinder man, his machine something called a Morrison, which is red, and which I had never heard of. (A few months after we met, he used his column to celebrate his reunion with the Ransomes, restored to life after an expensive visit to the repair shop.) When at home, he mows the best of the grass, between the house and a yew hedge, beyond which lies what used to be the vegetable garden, now laid to grass but some way short of graduation to lawn status. It takes him a couple of hours to do his share, the remainder being left to the foragers and the despised Honda. It is a good time for the mind, he says. The noise, the steady stride, the regular turning of the machine, bring up ideas for columns and speeches, and bring those half-formed to maturity. Even better is swinging the scythe, because of the quiet: ‘You have a problem in business or private life,’ he wrote in the Telegraph some years ago. ‘Take out the scythe and the chances are that the answer will come to you.’ The rare days he is around, he still swings the scythe, or strides behind his mower, or nurses his Bob Andrews Lawn Doctor as it devours the thatch, or fractures the peace of his thirty acres of woodland with the snarl of his chainsaw.

  I asked him about the roles of men and women in the garden. ‘Women are planters and creators,’ he replied, his old, parchment face creased in a smile. ‘We like destroying things, and when we tell them about the splendid things we’ve destroyed, they’re not in the least bit interested.’ The gardener reappeared, and together they cooed and clucked over the yellow rose, climbing with cheerful vigour towards the first-floor windows, and discussed what Mrs Deedes (as her husband referred to her) might make of the tomatoes.