by Tom Fort
The most fervent wildflower lover would be hard pressed to find beauty in plantain or ribwort. But there is music and poetry in other lawn-loving flowers: bird’s-foot trefoil, mouse-ear hawkweed, speedwell, hawkbit, selfheal, woodrush, dove’s-foot cranesbill, storksbill, madder, cinquefoil, crowfoot and celandine. To the Doctor, naturally, they are all enemies, plants growing in the wrong place, to be assaulted with a double or triple action killer. Since the development of the first chemical weed-killers, this has been the prevailing orthodoxy. It has at its heart the assumption of a conflict between grass and this host of adversaries, in which Man – with his management control programme and armoury of weapons – must constantly intervene if his grass is not to be overwhelmed.
Some years ago the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were advised that intervention on an epic scale was necessary to rescue from the paths of unrighteousness the two lawns which grace the east side of Chatsworth, providing the foreground to Paxton’s fabulous cascade. They are known as the Salisburys, and are, very likely, the oldest authentic lawns in the country. They were laid in the 1760s on the instructions of Capability Brown, and replaced the terraces of parterres and fountains which had delighted the first Duke. Brown, ruthless as ever in his disdain for the past, had the ground smoothed and harrowed and levelled and sown with hayseed. It was then left to itself for a couple of centuries, being grazed by deer into the 19th century, and thereafter mown by a succession of horse- and petrol-powered machines. It was never sown with any reputable grass seed, nor treated with any fertilizer, nor raked nor scarified. Nor did anyone bother about the vast diversity of plant species which found discreet sanctuary with the grass; until the 1980s, when it was noticed that the Salisburys did not look much like a normal lawn at all. The turf priests at the Bingley Research Institute near Bradford were consulted. They prescribed chemical attack, to be followed by recolonization with socially acceptable species of grass. At this point a Doctor Gilbert of Sheffield University leaped forward to advise the Devonshires that, in approving Bingley’s strategy of racial purification, they would be consigning a living tableau of gardening history to the dustbin. It is much to the Duke and Duchess’s credit that, notwithstanding their deep disapproval of Capability Brown’s original act of destruction, they ordered a reprieve for the Salisburys.
Doctor Gilbert and the head gardener at the time, Mr Hopkins, set about classifying the elements comprising this extraordinary heterogeneous carpet of herbage. Apart from most of the inoffensive flowers mentioned above, and a medley of mosses and lichens, they found heathers, violas, harebell, tormentil, sweet-vernal grass, yarrow, ox-eyed daisy, ladies bedstraw, sorrel and cat’s ear. This gorgeous, species-rich tapestry has ever since been allowed to proceed on its own sweet way, assisted by the occasional spiking to restrain the moss from running rampant, and a weekly mow. Viewed from the cascade, the sward seems almost to lap at the feet of the golden walls of the great house. Its surface is like that of a shifting sea, jade merging into emerald, light into dark, alive with secrets and changing moods. It is a marvellous, indispensable place for the lover of lawns to linger. Its diversity and capacity to surprise lift a curtain on the possibilities of your own lawn. And as you leave Chatsworth, you may stop where the bridge crosses the winding Derwent, and watch – as I did – the trout snaffling early mayflies; and look back at the house, luminous in early summer sunshine, and away across the park, at the wedges of woodland deployed by Capability on the skyline to the west, answered by the hanging woods on the eastern escarpment, with the great sweeps of pasture being cropped, as in days of old, by the fleeced forager.
I returned from Chatsworth inspired by a new tolerance and appreciation of the multi-ethnic lawn; which was as well, in view of the flourishing condition of the mouse-ear, clover, daisies and their friends. The new grass was also gaining ground. It looked at its best at first light, when the pallor of the green was brushed with the silver of the dew clinging to a tracery of minute cobwebs. By day it became apparent that the overall colour scheme was rather more distinctly variegated than that at Chatsworth. The green of the new grass was markedly more pale than that of the old, a contrast which struck me as either rather interesting or wholly absurd. The splashes of white provided by the clover, the yellow wink of the rogue buttercup, the stardust of the daisies and the different greens of their foliages, all added their tones.
I decided to make a virtue of the price I was paying for not adhering properly to the Doctor’s teaching. Having already expended the equivalent of a working month on weeding, stoning, raking, stamping, sowing, sieving and the rest of it – not to mention of a small fortune on soil, compost and seed – I simply could not be bothered to initiate an attritional war against the weeds. I told myself that there was no need to see my lawn as a test of my will and my manhood, that I had matured from that. To be sure, the Salisburys were two hundred years old and more, and mine but two months; and what could be regarded in Derbyshire as a gloriously rich integration of species might well appear at the rear of 27 Wood Lane as the symptoms of gross neglect. But, I reminded myself, there were more important things in life than the state of the garden, and more important things in the garden than the lawn, and more important things about the lawn than persecuting unwelcome intruders.
I went to Stowe in Buckinghamshire to ask the head groundsman, Steve Curley, about the task of keeping two hundred acres of high-grade turf in order. He took me to his shed, which was as big as an aircraft hangar and needed to be. He had eight men working under him, and an arsenal of machinery at his disposal, including five Ransomes Certies and a Lloyds Paladin for the close-cutting work, a Ransomes Mastiff 36-incher, a Jacobsen and a Beaver; and ranks of assorted lesser mowers, leaf blowers, edgers, strimmers, line painting machines, spray guns, fertilizer spreaders and much else besides. With six cricket squares, a golf course, assorted tennis courts and decorative lawns to be maintained, borders to be weeded, hedges to be trimmed, shrubberies to be spruced up; with Speech Day looming and everyone from the headmaster down reminding him – as if he needed reminding – of the importance of the place looking its best, Mr Curley was working most of the hours permitted by the rotation of the planet and was in no mood to consider a policy of appeasement towards his traditional foes. Grass was there to be cut, weeds to be killed, pests to be poisoned, worms to be harried and harassed, moles to be gassed.
Nor, as he hurried from one chore to the next, did Mr Curley have much inclination to pause and savour the atmosphere which is still so strong about this extraordinary place. So I left him to his dark reflections about Speech Day and wandered off, in search of the spirits of Cobham, Kent, Bridgeman, Brown and the others whose imaginations and ambitions and talents had come together to transform this valley into a place of infinite delight. I strolled past the Queen’s Temple and Concorde, in the shade of great sycamores and wellingtonias, and skirted the Grecian Valley, where the long grass, spangled with buttercups, bent with the breeze. I took the path past the Temple of Worthies, paying my respects to Milton, Locke, poisonous Pope and their companions, and breathed in an air rich with the damp of age-old mulch and water weed. I came to the Octagonal Lake, with the Palladian bridge to my left across a grassy slope being nibbled intently by fleeced foragers. Tadpoles swarmed at the water’s edge and lily pads stirred in response to secret motions below.
I moved along the bank, until I could stand with the lake behind me and look up towards the long, low south face of the house, its pale golden stone glowing in the sunshine. I found the glory bequeathed by Cobham intact, and it required no great effort of the imagination to surrender to it. But just as surely has it been diminished in our time. The necessity of maintaining Stowe as a school has spawned a notable assortment of inappropriate and downright nasty contemporary buildings, most of them mercifully hidden away in the trees. And what, one is compelled to wonder, would that distinguished soldier and patron of the arts have made of the squads of golfers in their peaked caps and canary yellow polo shir
ts, trundling their trolleys through his landscape of classical and literary allusion, whacking their little white balls in the direction of the drawing room Vanburgh had built him?
Weaving my way between the foursomes, I made my way up to the house, to look out from the top of the semi-circular flight of stone steps leading down from the south portico, and drink in the wonder of the composition. Is there anything finer in the gallery of garden landscape than this panorama? It is bound by the distant hillside, where the horseshoe of the Corinthian Arch stands. In the middleground is Bridgeman’s lake, guarded by a brace of pavilions whose reflections dance on the open water between the beds of lilies. The foreground is framed by dense woods of beech and chestnut, studded with the darker green of ancient yews and cedars. Almost from your feet, stretching down to the water, is the most superb sweep of turf imaginable: a lawn neither flat nor uniform in its slope, nor perfectly manicured, with its share of weeds and patches of windblown coarse grass, but incomparable in the way its emerald richness completes a great work of art. Its grandness, among the follies, absurdities and singular flights of fancy and genius, helps give Stowe its nobility. It must have filled Cobham’s heart with pride; apprehending, as perhaps he did, that the art of shaping Man’s inheritance to his pleasure could hardly reach higher.
At first sight, the Great Lawn at St John’s College, Oxford, would appear to exemplify the hoary dictum that the route to perfection in a sward is to lay the grass on a flat surface and to mow it regularly for two or three hundred years. Actually it does nothing of the sort, for, two centuries after the gardens were created by Capability Brown, the drought of 1976 killed off almost all of it. The magnificent turf that stretches away from the hydrangeas beneath the windows of Archbishop Laud’s library is less than a quarter of a century old, and is the product of a rigorously observed programme of care which is entirely dependent on contemporary machinery and chemicals. It is scarified, hoovered, solid-tined, hollow-tined, autumn fed, spring fed, rolled, weeded and mown and mown and mown.
When the second gardener, Barry Bowerman, came to St John’s the best part of forty years ago, almost all this labour was done by hand. The moss and thatch were taken out by wire rakes, the weeds removed one by one, the spiking done by fork, the ten tons of leaf mould required for the autumn top dressing sieved two spadefuls at a time. Times have changed – the size of the gardening staff has diminished, and so have their hours; new accommodation blocks stand where peaches, nectarines, grapes and vegetables were grown to feed the dons and their students; and the standard of care for the Great Lawn has been lowered, as the donkey work has been taken over by machines. But the principles of feed-and-weed, roll-and-mow are still observed. And the results – I was slightly troubled to find – are a ringing endorsement of the disciplinarian approach.
The lawn at St John’s is 180 yards long, 100 wide, and to mow it with the rotary Hayter, as Barry Bowerman periodically does, involves a seven-and-a-half-mile walk. It is enclosed at one end by the south side of the second quadrangle, and on the others by tall and stately copper beeches, chestnuts, oaks and sycamores, interspersed with shrubs and beds. The effect is dual. There is a grandeur about the scale, which is as generous as a city setting could reasonably permit; but with it comes that atmosphere of seclusion, intimacy and reflective tranquillity which those antique seats of learning still retain and make available to those prepared to take a few steps from the street past the porter’s lodge. Stand on the gravel path before the Great Lawn of St John’s, let the eyes play over the rich carpet of verdure – forgetting that it owes its condition to several hundredweight of nitrogenous fertilizer, and not to any special quality in the air – and one can feel, with Henry James, that the college garden is a refuge ‘from the restless outer world … a place to lie down on the grass forever, in the happy faith that life is all a vast old English garden, and time an endless summer afternoon’.
I came back from St John’s resolved that the Chatsworth creed of tolerance could be taken too far, that without some degree of discipline there was a danger of anarchy and social disintegration. On my front lawn the mouse-ear was out of control, driving what was left of the grass into headlong retreat. At the back the contest was in the balance, but the ranks of the weeds were reinforcing themselves, while my fescues and bents were on the back foot. With a tremor of remorse, I filled a watering can thrice with Verdone weedkiller, and did the dirty deed.
There was another serious upset. A small patch of the grass which I had sown on what had previously been a wild and woolly thicket of rose and other plants suddenly withered. Its perishing was accompanied by a mysterious elevation and cracking of the surface. It looked like a cold sore, and through the cracks were pushing little clumps of green leaves. I removed the dead turf and dug down. As I lifted the soil I uncovered quantities of revoltingly misshapen tubers resembling pieces of fresh ginger, from which had burst fat, penis-like shoots reaching upwards. They were, my wife told me, the remnants of a plant called a fatsia, the removal of whose subterranean support system had evidently been incomplete. The fatsia joined the sumach on my list of arch-foes.
I tried not to give way to retributive gloom about the perfection of other lawns; to stand back from the petty disappointments and irritations, and recall the wilderness that our garden had been a few short months before. Just as at Stowe, the best view of our garden was from the house. True, ours was obtained from the back door or the kitchen window, rather than a pillared portico; and we had neither Corinthian nor Doric Arch, but a pseudo-rustic affair from the timber yard down the road; and our answer to Kent’s Temple of Ancient Beauty was a rectangular shed of creosote-stained wood and rusty corrugated metal. But there were other affinities. Like Cobham and his men, Helen and I were seeking – albeit on a more modest scale – to impose upon disorder a concept of harmony. And by the end of that summer, as the beds she had planted bloomed, and the rose and clematis crept around the trellis and up towards the rustic arch, and the grass laid root, and the old apple and hazel trees bore their fruit, and the conkers on the chestnut swelled, we had no great difficulty in persuading ourselves that we had given a new lease of life to the place.
In retrospect, I can identify the application of that weedkiller as a watershed in my personal history as a lawnsman. The moment I emptied the sachet into the watering can and turned on the tap, stirring the powder and inhaling the smell of death from the frothy, greyish liquid, I took a decisive step back into the camp of conformity. We went away for a week at the end of September, to Corsica (where there are no lawns). When I came back, I found that the killer had begun its work. The mouse-ear, the ribwort, the plantains, were looking far from cheery. Their upper leaves were twisted and curled, those lower down yellowed and rotted by the poison. I took away a couple of bucketfuls of victims, which left the sward looking decidedly poxed. I decided that, having gone thus far, I must go forward again.
The approved programme of autumn lawn care has two major features: scarification and the application of a top dressing. The purpose of scarification is to remove dead grass and other accumulated rubbish, allowing the stems of the grass light and air, which are good for them. It may be done with a wire rake, deployed – in the Doctor’s words – with ‘considerable downward pressure’. Having done a good deal of this wearisome work earlier in the year, I had no desire to do any more. So I went to the local hire shop and asked if they had a machine to do it for me. I was presented with a motorized cylinder bristling with a fearsome array of slicing edges, arranged to savage the turf when revolved at speed. Fired into life, it roared and bucked in my hands, tearing at the surface like a wild animal. Within an hour, what had previously at least resembled a lawn was mutilated into something else.
By the end of the next day I had spread across my poor, wounded lawns a healing dressing of mixed topsoil and laboriously sieved manure. This extremely tedious procedure is defined by the Doctor as ‘vital’ for the achievement of first-rate turf. But I fear that in omittin
g some of the detail – adding sand and peat to the mixture, the use of something called a lute for distributing it, and the filling in and levelling of holes and hummocks – I may have mitigated the overall effectiveness. I was also a month later than I should have been, and the weather had settled into that state of permanent melancholic moistness typical of late October. As a consequence my dressing, instead of being dry and friable and willing to be brushed into the roots of the grass, tended to settle in damp lumps, which would attach themselves to the soles of my gumboots as I tramped to and fro. Apart from making my feet absurdly heavy, reducing me to an astronaut’s lumbering tread, this produced new declivities where the lumps were missing, making the expanse more uneven than ever.
But I pressed on. The final part of the operation was the belated reseeding of the grassless patches. To avoid collecting mobile seedbeds beneath my boots, I went barefoot, skipping with wet, white feet across the sodden surface, scattering seed as I went, and hoping very much that no one could see me.