A real grass act

The great British lawn is a marvel born of our wet weather, gardeners’ determination and the Industrial Revolution. Whether you like it neat and smooth or with daisies poking through, it remains a paragon of beauty, says Steven Desmond

- Steven Desmond

THE British are quietly proud of their lawns. Visitors from sunburnt nations are routinely astonished at the rectangles of green turf in front of so many homes, wondering how such a feat can be possible. In other places, these sights are usually accompanied by a sign on the gate informing the onlooker that stored rainwater has been used, to forestall vocal criticism of wastefulness. For once, however, the much-maligned British weather comes in handy. Our lawns are green because of our relatively mild climate and the pattern of rainfall, distributed throughout the year, rather than in one big annual campaign. Only Ireland is reli- ably greener, for obvious reasons. Our lawns are soft to walk across—and surprisingly damp to sit on, as every picnicker knows—only becoming hard in dry summer spells, when the visible loss of charm is seen and felt by everyone. This is, indeed, a green and pleasant land.

Our passion for lawns stretches back at least four centuries. Sir Francis Bacon wrote in 1625 that nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn. Certainly, Tudor owners of prodigy houses walked through their gardens on 6ft-wide stripes of turf short and fine enough to permit the ladies to wear shoes made of soft and delicate fabric. Before that, however, evidence of the lawn’s existence is harder to find: idealised images of medieval gardens show persons of refinement sitting on turf benches overlooking flowery lawns reminiscent of the best modern garden meadows or perhaps rather of panels of short grass studded with flowers, like a thinly stocked sheep pasture. But because symbolism was more important than admiration at the time, perhaps we should not read too much into those pictures.