The Grass is Greener Read online

  What is beyond dispute is that, for whatever jumble of reasons, when the mowing is finished that April morning our man will be contented. He hurls the last boxful of cuttings on to the now gently steaming heap, and turns back to view with quiet complacency the effect of his stripes. He silences his machine and returns it to its place of rest, perhaps offering a tribute to its dependability as he wipes the cutters clean with an oily rag. He throws down his gloves, with their new stains of green, beats off the spattering of grass attached to his shins, stamps his feet, becomes aware again of the extraordinary amount of noise birds make. He is ready to do battle in the supermarket, welcome a tiresome guest, play football with a clamorous son, attend to his beloved; to pick up again his spot in the society of human beings. He is strengthened by what he has done; and a good part of his comfort lies in the fact that – whether or not he is conscious of it at that moment – he must do the same next week, and the week after that, and every week until the earth again tires of making things grow.

  PART ONE

  In the Beginning

  Care must be taken that the lawn is of such a size that about it in a square can be planted every sweet-smelling herb. Upon the lawn, too, against the heat of the sun, trees should be planted, so the lawn may have a delightful, cooling shade

  ALBERTUS MAGNUS, Count of Bollstadt

  It is the rather tedious convention among gardening historians to begin with Genesis, which tells us that God created the first garden, eastward in Eden, and Adam the first gardener. The complacent assumption is that the Creator ordained gardening as humankind’s pre-eminent recreation; that in the garden, of whatever kind, he gave a virtuous echo of that first perfect state; and that, by implication, the garden would for ever be a source of solace and spiritual improvement. Should we also presume that in Eden the essentials were provided: not merely the earth, the seed, water and warmth, and perhaps a useful implement or two; but also the aspiration to cultivate that rich soil in a manner pleasing to the eye and refreshing to the spirit?

  The historians seize upon Genesis because it is somewhere to start, like a footpath sign. But scarcely have they taken the first steps along the path than it disappears into the dark, impenetrable tangle of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and early medieval Britain. They halt to scour the old chronicles, searching for a shard of light in the twilit thicket. But they are disappointed. There is enough evidence about life in first millennium Britain to show, for instance, that it was uncertain and often violent, that some held to the faith of Christ, that a minute handful could read and write, that amid the darkness the yearning to create beauty occasionally stirred and found expression. But of glimmers of interest in the garden as a diversion, the chronicles are almost bare. So they blunder on through the wildwood, until suddenly a shaft of sunlight does break through, and where it strikes the ground a sprig of green is visible.

  They rush towards it, falling upon it with desperate relief; and at once begin constructing great edifices. A reference is found in the annals of Ely to the planting by Abbot Brithnod of gardens and orchards, which is taken as proof that a tradition of ecclesiastical horticulture was firmly in place before the end of the 10th century. In some dusty record of domestic purchases, a note is found to the effect that three-and-tenpence was spent on turf for the London garden of the Earl of Gloucester’s curiously named brother, Bogo de Clare, from which is deduced a general enthusiasm among the 13th-century aristocracy for disporting themselves on cultivated grass. And from similarly nugatory smatterings are derived such absurdities as ‘medieval men loved their flowers’. It would indeed be cheering to know that, in those brutish days, some knew their pinks and carnations, cherished mulberry and pear trees, even laid turves and lived long enough to see the grass grow. Perhaps there were knights who occasionally dismounted from their palfreys to pick nosegays for their ladies, and paused awhile, fumbling for a way to express their tender feelings in elegant prose. But we may be sure that feuding, fighting, intriguing, keeping their subordinates in order and promoting their good offices with their lord counted for a great deal more.

  Go back almost two thousand years, to the heart of the Roman empire at its zenith, to Pliny’s garden near Ostia, where you might have strolled between hedges of box and mulberry, listening to your host moralizing about the destruction of Pompeii; or to his Tuscan villa where the terrace sloped to a soft and liquid lawn, surrounded by paths and topiary, shaded by cypress and plane trees. Here, far removed from the noise of war, men’s thoughts could turn to the pleasures of food and wine, and to beauty, the arts of poetry and sculpture, the taming of nature into a garden.

  Go back a thousand years, to pre-Conquest Britain. Here, men laboured to exist, and generally did not exist very long. Sharing their wattle and mud hovels with their livestock and attendant multitudes of vermin, they rose at daybreak, toiled through the hours of daylight on the land, devoured their dismal sludge of beans and stewed vegetables, went to sleep; and did that most of the days of their adult lives. Nor was the existence of their feudal lords much more refined. Their homes may have been bigger, but they were just as draughty, dark and smelly. They ate much the same food and were eaten by the same fleas. True, they did not spend their days in manual drudgery. But the round of banditry, quarrelling, organizing and repelling raids, and the duties of providing and beseeching protection which alone offered any hope of stability in a turbulent world, can have left little enough daytime for anything much beyond sharpening battle axes and watching backs.

  It is likely that a handful among the very richest among Britain’s Roman rulers included ornamental gardens within their villas. Excavations at Fishbourne in Sussex have revealed that, in the centre of a resplendent first-century country house, was a courtyard laid out as a garden, with a walk flanked by ornamental arbours and shrubs, and possibly beds of violets, pansies, lilies and assorted herbs. At a humbler level, the Celtic monks most probably made gardens of a kind within their monasteries and beside their huts; and the greater religious institutions – such as Ely – may well have boasted more extensive cultivated grounds.

  However, it was not until well after the coming of William and his Norman knights that the seedbed was laid on which the island’s first civilizing influences would eventually germinate and flower. It took time to impose Norman order on a barbarian territory infected for centuries by chronic disorder, and much killing and brutality. But the slow, reluctant bowing of the Anglo-Saxon shoulder opened the way to blessings the land had never known, chief among which was an emerging confidence in freedom from invasion. The establishment of a structure of government, however harsh and oppressive it was, undoubtedly assisted the birth of an idea of nationhood, and with that, an aspiration to explore life’s spiritual dimension.

  We shouldn’t make too much of this. For the labouring classes of husbandmen and villeins, life continued to equate to toil. The demands of persuading the ground to provide enough to eat, and of rendering service to the lord, consumed existence. For those lords, life was certainly easier – and for their princes, easier still – but still uncertain and usually abbreviated. They made war, and played at it in their tournaments; adjudicated on the grievances of their retainers; organized the defence of their realms and plotted to subvert those of their rivals. Their chief sport was to chase and kill animals, a diversion which they pursued with terrific enthusiasm. That life might have a gentler, more contemplative side seems to have occurred to few of them.

  But, the Norman order did provide for that side. Through the breach made by the warriors came the monks of Saint Benedict. They had built their great abbeys and accumulated their great estates in Normandy. Now they were invited to do the same in England. It was this engineered monastic revival which caused gardening’s green shoots to show.

  I used to know a man – later the editor of a well-known provincial newspaper – who told me in all seriousness that he had investigated a case in which an office worker from Slough had left his home one morning, walked a little way
along the road and fallen through an unusual kind of hole into the 14th century. Whether he was lost for ever, or managed to find a way to reascend into our own age, I cannot now recall.

  Were I to suffer a similar fate, and had I the choice among the variety of occupations open to men of the Middle Ages, I think I could do worse than be gardinarius in a Benedictine monastery. Brother Thomas I would be, a person of middling status in the monastic hierarchy, unregarded beside the abbot, the prior, the bursar, the precentor and the other major obedientiaries. Doubtless the monks of the scriptorium, with their noses buried in bibles and psalters, would look down on me, with my rough, weathered hands and attendant odour of fish; although they would be grateful enough when executing their illuminations for the dyes derived from the berries and flowers grown under my direction.

  Mine would be largely an outdoor life, and a most useful one. I would tend and jealously guard the monastery fishponds, watching over the carp, bream and pike, fattening them up with choice morsels until the feast day came and they were dispatched to the table to provide welcome relief from starch. I would, if there were a river, have an eel fishery; and trap them of a dark night in autumn when the migrating urge is on them, for no flesh of freshwater fish is richer or more tasty. I would have charge of the orchards, prune the apple and pear trees, tend to them at blossom time, gather in the fruit. I would know the way of bees and when to harvest their honey. I would know something of herbs and their ways, although their cultivation and medicinal use would probably be the responsibility of a specialist infirmarius. The sight of my vines would gladden my heart, and the thought of the wine they would provide would warm my spirit through the long hours of devotion and contemplation which the discipline demanded.

  The physical well-being of the monastery would depend, in great measure, on me; and productivity and usefulness would surely be my guiding principles. But there would be more to it than that.

  The theory of monastic life came from Saint Benedict: ‘None follows the will of his own heart.’ The practice meant a sufficiency of nourishment to sustain life, and little more; ample daily doses of organized communal devotion; a lot of hard work; and, during what was left from a monk’s waking hours, peace, quiet, and a setting conducive to the meditative working of the mind. And they knew, those clever monks, how much more likely the human mind was to turn to the profitable pondering of God’s mysteries if stimulated by God’s work at its most evidently pleasing. Enfolded in the harmony of nature, soothed and delighted by the song of the birds and the rustle of the leaves, caressed by the scents of the flowers and herbs, open to all the associations of the paradise garden, the inner being could soar.

  The famous Benedictine monastery blueprint found at St Gall in Switzerland, dating from the 9th century, confirms that the meditative heart of the monastery was the cloister garden, or garth. It was enclosed by one wall of the church, and by the communal buildings, the refectory and the monks’ cells. The church was for observing the liturgy, while the open space of the garden was supposed to encourage the brothers’ souls in private prayer and spiritual wrestling, to raise their vision from this world and its imperfections to the light made available in the Gospels of Christ.

  Its ability to promote this influence was, in part, derived from its dominant colour. From the earliest times, green had symbolized rebirth, resurrection, fertility, happiness both temporal and spiritual. Brides in ancient Palestine wore green. The green of the Prophet Mohammed’s cloak and of the banner beneath which he and his followers marched was the green of hope. But it is also the colour of tranquillity and refreshment. Long before modern science was able to establish that it is, indeed, the colour most restful to the eye because of the exactness with which it is focussed on the retina, the phenomenon had been accepted. In the 18th century Addison wrote: ‘The rays that produce in us the idea of green fall upon the eye in such due proportion that they give the animal spirits their proper play.’ A little later, the philosopher David Hartley defined the connection in his Observations on Man: ‘The middle colour of the seven primary ones, and consequently most agreeable to the organ of sight, is also the general colour of the vegetable kingdom.’

  The power of the colour was acknowledged by the chroniclers. In the records of the great monastery at Clairvaux, the sick man is seated upon a green lawn (‘sedet aegrotus cespite in viridi’), and ‘for the comfort of his pain all kinds of grass are fragrant in his nostrils … the lovely green of herb and tree nourishes his eyes’. The theme is taken up by Hugh of Fouilloy, who observes how ‘the green turf … refreshes encloistered eyes, and their desire to study returns. It is truly the nature of the colour green that it nourishes the eyes and preserves their vision.’

  On this basis – accepting that every visible trace of every medieval monastic garden was long ago expunged, and that no medievalist can know for sure what the physical reality of the monastic garden was – it is a reasonable assumption that it would have contained turf. Grass would have appeared of its own accord; and having done so, would have been approved as a generous, reliable supplier of the beneficence of green. These little patches, around which the cowled brothers shuffled murmuring from the Scriptures, or sat, eyes fixed upon the firmament, were the first lawns.

  There is some evidence – a nod here and there among the old books and illustrations – to suggest that cultivated grass was a feature of the handful of pleasure gardens created outside the great ecclesiastical institutions. Henry II’s garden at Clarendon in Wiltshire was said to boast ‘a wealth of lawns’. Under Henry III, turf was laid at the Palace of Westminster, and a herbarium ordered by him at Windsor Castle may well have contained a lawn. A drawing of 1280, now in the British Museum, shows a game of bowls being played on what could be a rudimentarily levelled expanse of grass. A few years earlier, there is a record of a squire of Eleanor of Castile being paid threepence a night to water the turves at Conway Castle.

  The date 1260 is honoured among historians who have sought to reassemble the long-buried elements of the medieval garden. In that year a Swabian nobleman turned Dominican friar, Albertus Magnus, Count of Bollstadt, produced the first gardening book, De Vegetabilis. And included in its wisdom – for which the name of Albertus Magnus should be blessed – are instructions for creating a lawn. The noble count counsels that the ground be cleared of weeds, flooded with boiling water and laid with turves which should be beaten down with ‘broad mallets and trodden’; then the grass ‘may spring forth and closely cover the surface like a green cloth’. Those who have explored these recondite places more thoroughly than me – chiefly the late John Harvey, to whose work I am glad to pay tribute – believe that a similar species of pleasure garden, ‘merry with green trees and herbs’, was described a few years earlier by the encyclopaedist Bartholomew De Glanville, much of whose work was subsequently lost.

  The digger in the past is mightily cheered by these nuggets. From them, it is clear that a primitive technique for nurturing grass did exist by the early 13th century. Someone had done it, others had copied him, adapting the methods, until a form of knowledge had coalesced to become sufficiently general for an educated man with a self-appointed mission to record the current condition of learning to include it. They are hardly more than names, Albertus and Bartholomew. But the fact that they wrote in Latin made their books as comprehensible in a monastery in East Anglia as in Dalmatia, Swabia or Rome. It is a pleasing fancy that, within the cloisters of Ely or Canterbury, some literate monk, emerging from a session of laborious copying in the scriptorium, might have encountered Brother Thomas the gardinarius (not much of a one for books, as you might gather from his earth-encrusted fingers and communion with carp), and passed on a couple of tips from the Swabian count on how to improve the scruffy condition of the grass in the cloister garth.

  Although it is convenient and gratifying to refer to these assorted patches of green as lawns, it is anachronistic and a touch misleading. The Latin word used by Bartholomew is pratum, which is translat
ed in English as ‘mead’, from the Old English medwe. The word ‘lawn’ is derived from the Old French laund, and was not known in the Middle Ages at all. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it made its debut in Thomas Elyot’s dictionary of 1548 – ‘a place voyde of trees, as in a parke or forret’. It retained this meaning, of an open space between trees, in Johnson’s dictionary of 1755, illustrated with lines from Paradise Lost:

  Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks

  Grazing the tender herb were interposed.

  Actually, had the great lexicographer inquired a little more assiduously, he would have found that the word had already been particularized to a degree, being applied to an expanse of grass laid down by design in the vicinity of a house, with the purpose of enhancing its appearance. But, although there are examples of the word being used in that sense quite early in the 18th century – for instance in Miller’s Garden Kalendar of 1733 – the application was far from universal. Indeed, as late as 1833, in The English Gardener, Cobbett refers to such features as ‘grass-plats’. Go back to Johnson, and you find these as ‘grass-plots’, defined as ‘a small level covered with short grass’, and illustrated with a line from Shakeapeare’s Tempest – ‘here on this grass-plot, in this very place, come and sport’.