The Grass is Greener Page 6

  Nonsense this may well be; but the notion was embraced with enthusiasm in the second half of the 18th century, and it sustained the development of the lawn as the essential canvas of the landscape garden. Capability Brown’s most voluble apologist, the Reverend William Mason, composed a long and unreadable poem, ‘The English Garden’, glorifying among much else the master’s deployment of the ha-ha, which

  … divides

  Yet seems not to divide the shaven lawn

  And parts it from the pasture; for if there

  Sheep feed, or dappled deer, their wandering teeth

  Will, smoothly as the scythe, the herbage shave,

  And leave a kindred verdure.

  The Arcadian idyll pictured in Mason’s leaden verses achieves a glimmering of reality in a series of paintings of Sir Thomas Lee’s seat, Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, which were executed by a Spaniard, Balthasar Nebot, in the late 1730s, and may now be seen at the county museum in Aylesbury. They illustrate neatly the manner in which new fashion was often grafted on to, rather than replaced, what was inherited. The elaborate topiary, grown to extraordinary heights during the previous half century, is retained. Sculpted heads in yew stand proud over sharp-edged walls of green. But instead of regarding the old rectangular parterres, they stare out over a medley of temples, statues and other cheerful stonework commissioned from James Gibb to brighten the place up.

  The avenues between the high hedges are mostly of grass, as smooth as cloth. While the quality – ladies in billowing dresses with caps on their heads, gentlemen in wigs, short coats, breeches and silk stockings – stand around, the labourers labour. Two scythemen are in blouses, rough trousers and squashed black hats. One swings the double-handed cutter, the other is sharpening his blade. A lad has laid his besom on the ground and is gathering the cuttings into a basket. A girl in cap and long skirt is wielding her broom, close to a gang of mythological characters in stone, with few clothes on.

  Elsewhere in the Hartwell paintings, a view of the wilderness behind the house gives glimpses of an obelisk, a temple, a turret and something resembling an igloo. Someone is pulling a roller across the grass towards a nude ancient with huge buttocks, while his fellow is gathering up more cuttings. In the distance, beyond a hedge, a flock of those useful animals dubbed the ‘fleeced foragers’ by William Mason are foraging. Another view shows foragers both fleeced and uddered a-nibble. In the foreground grass is being heaped by two-legged beasts of burden next to a pair of pensive gods. The lawns sweep right up to the walls of the mansion, the front door opening on to the bowling green, upon which the idle rich are at play. The green is enclosed by grass slopes, surmounted by dark barriers of evergreen.

  There is another painting of Hartwell, executed twenty years later, in 1757, by a hand other than Nebot’s. By now the topiary has been dug up, and the Octagonal Pond has been replaced by a lake of more ‘natural’ aspect. The classical statues have clearly been breeding. What has not changed are the roles. The gentry and their ladies are still sauntering about murmuring pleasantries to each other, while to one side or the other the peasantry sweat in a silence disturbed only by the swish of the scythe blade or the rasp of sharpening stone on metal. And the smooth, green turf, so soothing in appearance, so insistent in its demands, stretches away as it ever did, and does to this day.

  The Hartwell paintings give an idea of how they tended the stuff. But how did they grow it? To lay down the vast expanses required by the Brownian system was a mighty undertaking. The records at Chatsworth in Derbyshire – where Brown was at work in the 1760s – tell us that, having swept away the formal terraces and parterres to the east of the house, he had the ground sown with hayseed, and then left it to its own devices. But there was at least one famous garden creator who did take a closer interest.

  A visitor to Painshill, near Cobham in Surrey, wrote in 1769: ‘The general scheme of Mr Hamilton’s garden … is a great Lawn, supposed 200 acres, spotted with trees and surrounded on two sides by Pleasure Grounds.’ The Honourable Charles Hamilton, youngest son of the sixth Earl of Abercorn, organized the making of that lawn himself, and described how it was done in a letter to the Duke of Leinster. These were the essentials:

  Cleansing the ground thoroughly from weeds, and laying it down smooth; if any ground was very foul, I generally employed a whole year in clearing it, by ploughing it sometimes five, but at least four times, and harrowing it very much after each ploughing, first with an Ox Harrow, then with small Harrows; this harrowing brings up all the couch grass and weeds to the surface; which after every harrowing I had raked up in heaps and burned … to make the ground even I made them plough the ridges into furrows … then harrow across the ridges … I set a few men to work with spades to beat about some of the loose earth.

  Hamilton sowed each acre with ‘six English bushels of the cleanest hayseed I could get and ten pounds of fresh Dutch clover seed’. He knew all about germination:

  If the ground was in sowing order about the beginning of August, and that month proved a wet one, I took the first opportunity I could, and sowed the grass seeds … the moisture and warmth of that month made them grown immediately and fast enough to establish their roots before Winter, and resist the Frost.

  Like Shenstone, Hamilton ploughed his own furrow in devising his pleasure grounds; and like Shenstone, he was in the grip of an unappeasable obsession; and like Shenstone, he was eventually ruined by it. But unlike the poet, he does not appear to have been a student of the theoretical aspects of the relationship between beauty, art and nature. He was a practical visionary, who took a great sweep of barren heathland and endeavoured to train it into a match for his dreams.

  The lawn at Painshill came early on, in the 1730s. Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa and other interminable sentimental romances, marvelled at how Hamilton ‘burned the heath, spread the ashes, grew turnips, fed the sheep on the turnips’, in order that ‘their dung became a good manure so that a fine sward of grass is now upon the land, where it was judged by most people impossible to get any herbage’. Richardson proceeded to endow the property of his preposterous hero, Sir Charles Grandison, with the glories of Painshill:

  The park itself is remarkable for its prospects, lawns and rich-appearing trees of large growth. The gardens, vineyards etc. are beautifully laid out. The orangery is flourishing; everything indeed is that belongs to Sir Charles Grandison. Alcoves, little temples, seats are erected at differing points of view; the orchard, lawn and grass walks have sheep for gardeners; and the whole, being bounded only by sunk fences, the eye is carried into views that have no bounds.

  As prose, this is awful; and the novel is surpassingly dull, sunk – in the words of Chambers Biographical Dictionary – by the ‘prolix impeccability of its superfine hero’. But that description of the grounds of Grandison Hall is interesting, in that it may well have corresponded to the aspiration of rich country gentlemen of the mid-18th century; interesting, too, that the mowing should have been contracted out to Mason’s ‘fleecy foragers’.

  The purpose of the great lawn at Painshill was to expose and enhance the view. Its maintenance could then be left to the foragers. Having created that view, Hamilton proceeded to create the features worthy of it. He dug a great lake with islands and ornamental bridges, built a Roman Mausoleum, a famously fanciful Turkish Tent, a Temple of Bacchus, a Hermitage which even had a hermit for a few weeks until he took to drink and was sacked. Finally Hamilton over-reached himself, with the Grotto made from tufa which he placed on the biggest of the islands in the lake. Debts closed over his head, and he was forced to sell Painshill and move to a more modest home in Bath.

  But Hamilton had much to be proud of, and proud he had been. He provided horse-drawn chairs on wheels to enable casual visitors to inspect the wonders. Anyone with any pretension to involvement in the advance of taste came to Painshill. The Reverend William Gilpin, self-appointed prophet of the virtues of the Picturesque movement, descended on Painshill, and thought the Te
mple of Bacchus ‘very happily introduced’, but deplored the failings of the Great Lawn, ‘too much patched by clumps and the eye disagreeably caught by white seats, bridges and the grotto’.

  More significantly, Thomas Jefferson saw Painshill in 1786, when it was still not far short of its full glory. ‘A boldness of design and happiness of execution’, wrote Jefferson, ‘attend the wonderful efforts which Art has made to rival Nature.’ Could it be that Jefferson’s mind retained an impression of Painshill when he ordered the laying down of lawns in the English style at his formatively celebrated Virginia estate, Monticello; that Charles Hamilton’s Great Lawn glowing in the heathland of Surrey was a primary inspiration for what was to become the American passion for the cultivation of fine grass? I like to think so.

  It is doubtless a symptom of the maturing of a recognizably English style of garden design that the progress of the 18th century should have seen ever more intemperate and passionate exchanges of abuse between those who had volunteered themselves as authorities on what John Evelyn, in a more innocent age, had characterized as ‘the best of diversions’. Addison started it, mocking the topiarists. Pope, supreme master of invective, took up the baton, and witty Horace Walpole followed his way. But their scorn, hurtful though it must have been for their victims, can be seen as a necessary aid to growing up; and, moreover, it is amusing to read. In their footsteps, however, strode lesser men, swelled with a great sense of self-importance, deficient in wit, bursting with conceit. Poor Lancelot Brown, with his capabilities, his lakes, his sweeps of grass and soothing clumps and belts of trees, was chief target for their bile. ‘Is it not singular’, mused Sir William Chambers – a mediocre architect and designer and self-appointed authority on the wonders of Chinese civilization –

  that in this island the Art [of gardening] is abandoned to kitchen gardeners, well skilled in the culture of sallads, but little acquainted with the principles of Ornamental Gardening. It cannot be expected that men uneducated and doomed by their condition to waste the vigour of life in hard labour, should ever go far in so refined, so difficult a pursuit … In England, where no appearance of Art is tolerated … a stranger is often at a loss to know whether he is walking on a meadow, or in a pleasure ground, made and kept at a very considerable expense.

  It is hardly surprising that the arrogance of these comments, and the gibe at Brown’s lowly origins, should have aroused anger. Into the ring leaped Capability’s staunch defender, William Mason; and Chambers retired from public controversy under a broadside directed at his anaemic, pseudo-Oriental work at what was to become Kew Gardens. But by now Gilpin’s creed of the picturesque was on the march. In 1772 Gilpin published his Observations on Several Parts of England, illustrated with his own aquatints, in which he extolled the grandeur, variety and unpredictable wildness of untamed nature, contrasting these virtues with those of the ‘embellished artificial scene’, much to the latter’s disadvantage.

  To Gilpin’s disciples – chiefly a brace of Herefordshire squires, Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight – the soothing predictability of the Brownian formula was anathema.

  Curse on the Shrubbery’s insipid scenes!

  Of tawdry fringe encircling vapid green

  thundered Knight in his ‘The Landscape – A Didactic Poem’. Sir Uvedale Price, in his Essays on the Picturesque, heaped obloquy on the legacy:

  It would be difficult to invent anything more wretchedly insipid than one uniform green surface dotted with clumps of trees and surrounded by a belt … Smoothness, verdure and undulation are the most characteristic beauties of a lawn, but they are in their nature closely allied to monotony … Mr Mason observes that that green is to the eye what harmony is to the ear … the long continuance of either without some relief is equally tiresome to the senses.

  To Brown’s defence came his successor as chief designer to the great and the rich, Humphrey Repton; possibly motivated as much by the desire to stand up for the profession as out of loyalty to the precepts of Capability. Repton was impatient with the intolerance of the amateurs, and had no time for their obsession with what he regarded as the false correlation between gardening and painting. How they squandered their fortunes on their whims was irrelevant to the business of making gardens. He – like Brown – had clients, who had ideas of their own, budgets, geographically awkward properties. To Repton, what mattered were ‘congruity of style, uniformity of character, and harmony of parts’. His guiding light was his own excellent taste, which, for instance, led him to banish lawns from the immediate environs of the house and to reintroduce such novelties as flower beds, gravel walks and conservatories.

  The controversy raged on, to the close of one century and into the next, until the protagonists ran out of brimstone, aged, and died, leaving the next generation to pick out what was of lasting value, and discard the mass of hot air. The absurdity of the row was that, when it came to the practical application of high-flown theory, no one had any consistent notion of what they should be doing. This impotence made the theorists very cross, apt to magnify the smallest difference in emphasis into a chasm of principle. And it is true that a corrective to the Brownian formula was probably needed, and that the reorganization of the English countryside had gone far enough. Anyway, by now great forces were at work; forces which would close the long era in which the development of the garden in England had been dictated by the inclinations and spending power of society’s uppermost tier.

  The Moral Lawn

  The term ‘lawn’ is applied to that breadth of mown turf formed in front of, or extending in different directions from, the garden front of the house

  JOHN CLAUDIUS LOUDON

  The high and the mighty had prospered exceedingly under the House of Hanover, and a spirit of competition had grown up among the swelling ranks of the aristocracy and gentry as they acquired their country residences and set about dignifying them. Their ambitions had vaulted far beyond the provision of comfort and safety for themselves and their dependants. They aspired to mansions and estates whose scale and magnificence might be accepted by society as sound measures of their status.

  Turning the pages of William Watts’s Seats of the Nobility and Gentry (1779) and William Angus’s Seats of the Nobility (1787) gives a sense of how well the landed aristocracy had done, and the standards of taste it had come to share. Upon the parks surrounding the porticoed piles – variously ‘great and agreeable edifices’, ‘noble mansions’, or ‘great and excellently situated seats’ – the mark of Capability Brown is stamped. The elements of these compositions are few, and they do not vary much. There is usually a lake, with an ornamental bridge. There are trees, in belts and clumps. There are broad gravelled drives with carriages rolling up them and dogs frolicking behind. And there is a sea of shorn grass, from which stags and their hinds stare deferentially at the great house. Close by the lord’s habitation scythemen may be at work, attended by boys with baskets for removal of the cuttings. At a decent distance, beyond the ha-ha, the fleeced foragers nibble.

  It is tempting to invest these old prints with a spurious quality of timelessness. They correspond with a sentimental notion of an English rural way of life held together in tranquil stability by the relationship between lord or squire and tenantry. In fact, of course, the acquisitive march of the new landed aristocracy had been rapid, self-interested, and was comparatively short-lived. Even as William Watts and William Angus were ingratiating themselves with their titled subscribers, its impetus was faltering. Capability Brown died in 1783, and although Repton strode energetically and profitably in his footsteps, the fair wind which had assisted the patrician class in helping itself to swathes of the English countryside was fast running out of puff. The war with France – with its accompanying resurrected nightmare of invasion – began in 1793, and cast its shadow for the best part of quarter of a century. In 1816, the ageing Repton, surveying the changing scene, observed sadly, ‘In the last ten years, the art of landscape gardening, in common with all other arts which
depend on peace and patronage, has felt the influence of war and war taxes, which operate both on the means and the inclination to cultivate the arts of peace.’

  By the time Repton died, the balance of economic power had shifted decisively from the landed élite to an emergent class of men who made money by making things and selling them. The flying shuttle had come, and the spinning jenny; the steam engine and the power loom; wrought iron and cast iron. An unprecedented purchasing power was being created among people who – although they swiftly developed the urge to deploy it – were searching for the means, for someone to tell them how to do it.

  Repton had managed to tack with the new breeze pretty cannily. He knew that if he continued to rely upon aristocratic patrons, the orders would dry up. Without fuss, he diversified, jettisoning most of Capability Brown’s canons, and embracing a sensibly malleable version of the picturesque, calculated to appeal to a prosperous but not landed clientele. Earnestly, he assured them that he cared as much for their few acres as he had for the estates of earls and marquesses. And, being a conscientious fellow, he persuaded them sufficiently, and even himself. Almost his last work was at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, a mere eight acres, which he called ‘the child of my age and my declining years’. Weary of gravel walks, broad stretches of lawn bounded by beds of flowers and shrubs – ‘everywhere promiscuously mixed and repeated’ – Repton flung novelty at his little patch, mingling a parterre embroidered with raised beds with a reconstructed monk’s garden, a rosary, a rock garden, conservatory, cloistered walk, grotto, and much else besides; although, I’m relieved to say, he retained a lawn, dotted with shrubs.