The Grass is Greener Read online

  THE GRASS IS GREENER

  An Anglo-Saxon Passion

  Our Love Affair with the Lawn

  TOM FORT

  COPYRIGHT

  William Collins

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

  Copyright © Tom Fort 2000

  Tom Fort asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

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  Source ISBN: 9780007291342

  Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780007391141

  Version: 2016-01-13

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  PRAISE

  THE GRASS IS GREENER

  ‘Here is cultural history at its best: the story of the lawn, and the implements used to cut it, and the place it has in our culture and psyche. It is clear that the author is in thrall to the green stuff, as there is a wonderful personal account of the first lawnmower in his life, and of the details of his ongoing struggle to develop his own lawn to a level he feels satisfied with’

  Country Life

  ‘A confident writer, he meanders into social commentary, definitions of Englishness and observations on masculinity, without ever going too far from his subject. I bet he can mow in straight lines’

  New Statesman

  ‘Fort’s own perspective is, however, resolutely gardenesque. He loves lawns and lawnmowers. They are entangled with his dearest memories. He is a founder-member of the Old Lawnmower Club (membership 249 men and one woman) and the enthusiasm that pervades his book can make even that seem not ridiculous but somehow admirable’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Even those without green fingers will find Fort’s hymn to horticulture entertaining. So you mad workers have nothing to lose but your daisy chains. Go on, stay in bed this weekend, give us all a rest’

  Yorkshire Post

  ‘Tom Fort … in this ardent summertime essay on lawns and lawnmowers, conjures up a multitude of green thoughts in a green shade. Marvellous!’

  Irish Times

  ‘Mower Man’s full blown identity is explored for the first time by Tom Fort. Ostensibly about the English love of lawns, The Grass is Greener is more an apologia for ‘our man’, as Fort puts it, and his intimate relationship with his beloved lawn’

  Financial Times

  ‘I must admit that I did enjoy this celebration of my garden bete noire. This says a great deal about the achievement of the author. Fort has a lightness of touch which makes this book oddly beguiling as he hurtles us from the herber (medieval garden) down to today’s average patch of greenery. This is an effortless … and funny read’

  The Mail on Sunday

  ‘The Grass is Greener is a discursive and jolly book … Tom Fort comes into his own after the days of scythes and besoms, with the invention of the mechanical mower: “a small, peaceful revolution”.’

  Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review

  DEDICATION

  To my mother

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  PRAISE

  DEDICATION

  Prelude

  Part One

  In the Beginning

  Pleasures of the Green

  Shaven Lawns and Vapid Greens

  The Moral Lawn

  Musings from The Shed (1)

  Albert’s Morning March

  Part Two

  Budding Genius

  The Budding’s Flowering

  The Glory of the Garden

  Velvet Robes

  Greensward and Minimum Bovver

  Musings from the Shed (2)

  Lawn Order, Man’s Business

  Part Three

  The Lawnsmen

  The Mowermen

  My Sward and Others

  KEEP READING

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PRELUDE

  The Lawnsman Cometh

  It is mid-April, anywhere in suburban England, anywhere among a million courts, crescents, closes, avenues, drives, groves, ways; anywhere the ornamental cherries are in pink flower and the hanging baskets standing guard by the front porch are glowing with spring colour. It is a Saturday. Enough of the morning has gone for breakfast to have been eaten, for the newspaper to have separated into its dozen sections, for the dog to have been tickled behind the ears and the wife brought her tea, for the milk bottles to have been deposited by the step with a dissonant chime; for that breeze, carrying with it the first foretaste of the warmth of summer, to have rid the little kingdom behind the house of the worst of the clammy moisture night has laid on it. Already our man has found time amid his chores to go out and sniff the air. Its savour has brought a softening to his features, a shadow of a smile, while resolving them into an expression of purpose.

  I say ‘our man’, because apart from his maleness and sense of purpose and the fact that he is likely to be between thirty and four score years, I cannot characterize him further. He may be shaven or stubble-chinned, regimentally smart or irredeemably scruffy, self-employed or nine-to-five wage slave, respectably retired, painfully redundant. His demeanour and circumstances tell us nothing. All we may safely say of him is that he cares for the order of the space by his home. We must see him in action.

  By now he will, morally, have cleared the decks. He may have walked the dog, made the breakfast, got the paper, tapped the barometer, discharged half a dozen trivial duties; or he may have just rolled out of bed, grabbed a cup of instant and surveyed the scene. In both cases, he will have endeavoured to dispose of clutter. He will have organized himself to be free from distractions. Before his task is done, he will not wish to go to the supermarket or welcome guests. Demands which interfere are likely to make him extremely irritable.

  There are preliminaries to the observances. He will dress, not necessarily with care, but properly: perhaps in a boiler suit, or ragged sweater and filthy oil-stained jeans; in what he calls his ‘garden shoes’, or just grubby trainers. Whatever the outfit, it will be indissolubly associated in his mind with the garden and the duties laid on him by it. With it belong the well-worn gloves, dirt behind the fingernails, the odour of bonfire lingering about the hair, an ache in the lower back, a sudden and virtuous need for tea, that particular expulsion of breath that accompanies a satisfied survey of a job well done.

  At ease in the familiar raiment, he makes his way to the shed. To the ignorant observer, this structure will be no more than a utilitarian assembly of wood, brick or breeze block, surmounted by a corrugated roof. More often than not, its condition is decrepit, if not ruinous. But it would be erroneous to deduce deficiency of regard from this neglect. To our man, the shed represents a
precious antithesis to the home. It speaks to him of an older, more elemental life. It is a place where he is master, where standards other than those of cleanliness and neatness and newness apply.

  To our man, the harsh monosyllable – ‘shed’ – has a comforting, spiritual resonance. His secular self acknowledges that it is a dumping ground for tools, machinery, teetering towers of old flowerpots, cobweb-festooned stacks of garden chairs with rotted canvas seats, bags of Growmore, packets of ant powder, bottles of weedkiller with tops that will not turn, brushes rigid with ancient creosote, drums of unruly wire netting with last autumn’s leaves held crispy in the mesh, loops of wire hanging from rusty nails, saws with rusting teeth which he has intended to oil and clean these past five years, and a great accumulation of other relics.

  But to him it is much more than a mere storage space. It is a sanctum, a private place where his soul is nourished. It should have the quiet of a chapel, although in a good cause that may be fractured by electric drill or thumping hammer blows. There is much dust, but it lies still, and the old flies caught in the cobwebs in the corners are undisturbed. The shed is like his mind, crammed with the forgotten, the half-forgotten and the redundant. In its recesses teeter piles of junk, which – if ever retrieved – at once spill their old stories. It is a place to pause, to contemplate, to sniff that rich, musty old smell, to pick up things and put them down again, to arrange and rearrange. It is a place with a force of its own; which he respects, because each time he rolls up his sleeves and becomes extremely dirty imposing order on it, it reverts in its own time to disorder. That is as it should be.

  On this morning, our man does not linger among the shadows. He has pressing business with a machine in green. He finds his gloves, slips his hands into their familiar griminess, grasps the well-worn handles, and drags it forth into the sunlight. It may be a modest contraption, requiring no more than a steady push for it to do its work. It may be electric and murmur as it goes, or be powered by petrol, and roar. The motion of its blades may be forward or circular. It may be a foot wide, or four. It may have cost ten pounds at a jumble sale, or three thousand from a showroom. Its common characteristics are its colour – it is, or should be, green – and its function, which is to cut grass.

  Although the fundamentals of the ensuing ritual do not vary much, the mood of the devotees does, in a way dictated by the condition of the machine. This has little to do with its cost or quality, but rather the manner in which it was put to rest at the end of the previous mowing season. Broadly speaking, there is a gulf between those who, recognizing that the season is at an end and that another will inevitably come, clean, oil, repair and cover their mowers; and those who do not. I make no moral judgement here, which is as well, for I belong in the second category. It is the case that those in the second category would often wish themselves in the first, while the converse does not apply.

  That futile longing is usually at its most intense on this Saturday morning in April. Those who tended properly to their machines when the leaves were tumbling last November can now regard them with a virtuous smile. The metalwork gleams, the pale tops of the spark plugs wink, the cutters are dark and smooth and sharp (for they have been taken to the workshop in early winter, when they received prompt and unhurried care). This machine is primed and ready.

  Contrast this to the shame of us in the second category. We view our machine, not with a self-satisfied smirk, but a grimace of horror. The plug is buried under a clod of slimy, decomposed vegetable matter. There is still grass in the box, mixed with dark, rotted leaves. The cutters are rimmed with accretions of hard earth and fossilized herbage; and, worse, when you scrape this off, you find the cutting edge itself mutilated and split by collisions with stones. You remember: how you swore, but a few months back, that this time you would cherish your loyal servant and attend to its needs; how you finished that last mow as dusk and a dozen competing demands closed in; how you wheeled it, still warm and smoking, into the shed, and abandoned it with your promise; how winter came and the garden became dank, dreary and repulsive, the shed cold and uninviting.

  Never mind. It has endured the same each winter and come through. If it had a mind, it would doubtless wish you in the first category as well. But that is a matter of secondary importance, when there is work to be done.

  Before operations begin, our man will scout the terrain. Consciously or unconsciously, he will sense that the grass beneath his feet has lost the flabby inertness of its dormancy. There is a spring to it. It is quickening with restored life. Its lustre, the sprouting of the daisies and clover, simultaneously gladden his heart and remind him of his duty. He is most unlikely to stop and ponder why this should be; what it is within him that is fulfilled by the annual taking up of the challenge. He has neither the time nor the inclination to analyse the nature of the drama. There is a lawn to be mowed.

  Now, for the first time, we hear the Saturday music of the mower. As sound, it is horrible: loud, discordant, disconnected, structureless. But to those of the faith there is a mysterious sweetness to it. Familiarity annihilates its brutishness, leaving its rhythms, its pauses, its cadences, its crescendos and diminuendos, to exercise their role as indispensable accompaniment to the ritual.

  In the case of the push mower and the electric mower, sound and purposeful action come together. But for the petrol-driven mower, there is an overture, initiated by the pulling of the starter rope or cranking of the handle. With first-category devotees, this will be brief: an introductory bar consisting of a couple of smooth pulls, before the rich orchestra of the motor adds its throaty weight. For second-category worshippers, the overture may well be protracted; indeed, it may well be the prelude, not to mowing the lawn at all, but to a hurried dash to the repair shop, a thoroughly unfruitful exchange with an overburdened mechanic, and a day of painful non-consummation.

  But this day we will have none of that. The cutters are unclogged, the layers of old muck prized off, the oil checked, the petrol tank filled. The handle is pulled once, twice, three times. The wheel revolves lifelessly. The flow of fuel is checked, the plug cleaned. The rope is yanked in earnest, with a silent prayer that it will not – as has been known – snap in the middle. Now there is, at last, an answering cough, like that of a half-drowned man. It dies, and there are further twiddlings with accelerator and choke. Again the rope is pulled, and this time the music of returning life is heard. Smoke belches, black as impurities are incinerated, then blue. With the depression of the accelerator, the volume increases. The cutters are engaged and the music acquires breadth and depth, as when the tubas and trombones join the orchestra.

  For a moment our man is held by the sound, and by the power transmitted from the engine through the handles to his forearms. These forces enclose him, shutting him off from the world of bird song, barking dogs, aeroplanes, his squealing children, a wife who would trouble him with shopping lists or holiday brochures. He grips the handles tight, and guides the machine towards the grass. As he meets the lawn, the cutters engage. The first shower, lush and juicy, shoots forth into the box, emerald spattered with the white of the daisies. But our man’s appreciation of the aesthetics is unconscious. His intelligence is focussed on the line he must follow.

  The creation of the pattern is central to the ritual. One of the old textbooks recommends that the most pleasing effect is achieved by starting with the outer circumference, and mowing in a continuous, decreasing circuit until the centre is reached and shorn. But that requires what few of us have, a lawn shaped in the shape of a symmetrical oval or circle. Our man observes orthodox practice. He executes two careful circuits of the outer edge to give himself a margin, and once the furthest curve permits, he cuts across it in the first straight lines. As he moves into the main body of the lawn, the lines become longer. It is in the sculpting of those lines that his spirit receives much of its nourishment. Here is rhythm, regularity, the measured tread behind the devouring machine, the sweeping turn at each end as the whizzing blades slice the
air within inches of the heads of flowers or the buds of shrubs, before the controlled flourish is completed and it is back to the straight and narrow. And all the time the proportion of the grass which has succumbed to our man’s control appreciably and visibly grows, and that left in its quasi-natural state diminishes.

  By the time he halts the machine to empty the box for the first time, the comforting familiarity of the ritual has reclaimed him. He may put his nostrils close to the damp mass of cuttings, inhale that fresh, innocent smell which speaks to him of his history as a mower and the lawns he has mown. His pleasure is conscious now, as he marches the old route to his compost heap, lying in mouldering peace in some unregarded corner of his domain, and lays the season’s first bright offering over the tea leaves, coffee grinds, potato peel and cabbage stalks. He may pause a moment to spread the cuttings, thinking how many more times he will perform this office before the season of growth is out. Before he is finished this day, that deposit will be buried deep, its greenness yielding to yellow and grey as the bacteria go to work.

  Back to his waiting machine our man strides. A quick push or two on the accelerator – whose results are audible half way down the street – and he is off again. See how the beast eats up the ground, while his feet fall with firm, noiseless tread on the beheaded blades. The flower bed looms, but he does not begin the turn until full contiguity with his previous stripe is accomplished. The faded daffodil heads will surely be lost; but no, he sweeps in a circle, tilting back the snarling cutters, easing back on the accelerator, his body following in a disciplined arc. And the next stripe is laid.

  Thus, by measurable degree, the task is performed. Somewhere deep inside our man, a need is answered. Were he to be questioned, he would mumble something about having to keep the place tidy. His machine has brought order to the lawn; he orders the machine. A psychologist might identify a different order of precedence among the elements of man, machine and herbage; wondering who or what was really in control, who was whose servant, who whose master; might search deeper still, into the possible symbolism of the stripes, recollections of marks inflicted or suffered in school canings, sublimations of flagellistic or masochistic urges. Our man’s need might be inadequacy, his desire for control an obsession, his adherence to ritual a mask for a pathetic deficiency of self-esteem.