A Nation High On Freshly Cut Grass

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 5, 2006

by Peter Timms

Colonial gentlemen tamed it, suburban blokes worshipped it and an arid climate threatens to kill it. Where next for the lush green lawn?

This is an edited extract from Australia's Quarter Acre, by Peter Timms (Miegunyah Press, $39.95).

LAWNS ARE MEN'S business. Women mow when they have to, but only men make an issue of it, because they think of the lawn as a distinct area, rather than as part of the ensemble of house and garden. In the 1950s and '60s, scantily clad females appeared in advertisements to demonstrate how light, simple and virile the new rotary mowers were, although everyone knew that walking behind a Victa in a bikini was a bad idea. Chaps, by contrast, were invariably shown wearing sports jackets and ties.

My father, like many middle-class males of his generation, regarded the front lawn as his exclusive domain, leaving the garden beds to my mother, so long as they formed a neat, unobtrusive background. Plants were relegated to a thin fringe along the fence lines and across the front of the house, decisively separated from the lawn by a concrete edging strip specifying where her responsibilities ended and his began. Spring was greeted each year with the rituals of aerating, top-dressing, feeding and weeding the lawn, to which end a cornucopia of fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and other deadly potions lay waiting in the workshop.

Only the front lawn received the special attentions of the big Atco cylinder mower. It alone produced the desired bowling-green stripes, which my father ensured were straight and evenly spaced. I was never allowed to use the Atco. I was, however, entrusted with the Victa on the back lawn, which did not demand anywhere near the level of care given to the front.

Today's homeowners take considerably less interest in their turf than those of my father's generation. The cylinder mower, whose only advantage lay in the quality of the result, has almost entirely given way to the rotary, except on bowling greens and cricket pitches, where an ultra-smooth finish is essential. Cutting the lawn is, for most people, a chore to be dispensed with as quickly as possible.

For men like my father, a well-tended lawn had moral value. His superior lawn made him, in his own mind, a superior sort of person. This is why the front lawn - as a public statement - was so much more important than the back.

In a way, the decline of the lawn is to be regretted, for lawn care is an act of connoisseurship - the taking of infinite care over the creation of something beautiful. A well-maintained lawn, like a well-clipped hedge, is beautiful.

Originally, a lawn was any treeless, untilled ground. Only in the early 18th century was the word appropriated by gardeners to mean an area of mown grass. Rich folk had been enjoying the benefits of "green grass finely shorn" (as Francis Bacon referred to it) since the Normans brought peace and stability to English life in the 11th century. Meadows of grasses, herbs and flowers were maintained not only for games and relaxation but also to revive the physical health of the sick and the spirits of the melancholy.

But the lawn as we know it - an area of mown grass maintained primarily for its aesthetic benefits - came into being with the advent of the so-called English natural garden in the 18th century, with Lancelot "Capability" Brown bringing it to its most flamboyant expression. Brown's vast expanses of lawn demanded a phenomenal amount of work from an army of scythers and sweepers, and were strictly the reserve of the wealthy.

It was the early 19th-century garden designer John Claudius Loudon who introduced the lawn into the suburban garden, where it was often no more than a negative space setting each garden bed apart from its neighbours. Loudon turned the lawn from a feature in its own right into a canvas upon which flowerbeds and trees were arranged.

On Saturday afternoon, as you trudge up and down your front lawn behind the mower, Edwin Budding is the man you really have to thank. He did more than anyone to convert the lawn from a symbol of wealth and power into one of middle-class respectability by patenting the first lawn mower in 1830. A cumbersome cast-iron beast, it represented a considerable leap forward, though it didn't really catch on until the 1870s. By the end of World War I, petrol-driven mowers and even an Australian-made battery-powered model had become available, although they were too heavy and too expensive to have been anything more than novelties.

The suburban lawn is, of course, a particularly English phenomenon and proved important in the process of civilising the heathen nations. As one British writer puts it, "from Simla to Oman, from Cape Town to Gibraltar, wherever the Queen was on her throne and valiant English gentlemen wore 24-ounce serge in the tropical heat, our message to the subject races was: look upon our Lawns, ye mighty, and despair."

Despair was the word. The first settlers soon found Sydney's dry climate and sandy soils were unsuited to the growing of lawns, although, aesthetically at least, the undulating topography lent itself well to the landscape style. By 1828, Sydney's Government House garden had large swathes of lawn in the manner of Capability Brown, since labour, of course, was not a problem. Mansions of the rich colonists, who also had convicts to swing the scythes, had lawns from the verandas right down to the water's edge.

However, lawns were out of the question for most people until the advent in the latter half of the 19th century not only of lightweight mowers but also of reticulated water supplies and hoses.

Of the many thousands of grasses known, only those very few that can survive constant cutting and foot traffic are suitable for lawns. Buffalo grass, introduced into Australia in the 1860s from South America via the United States, proved especially popular because of its toughness. In 1936, an enterprising Sydney contractor offered home delivery of squares of buffalo turf. It was Australia's first instant lawn, but it failed to find a market.

Those wanting a refined surface chose couch. It originated in Africa and has been grown in England since the early 17th century. Couch grows quickly in warm areas and, because of its fine texture and tolerance of close mowing, is favoured for bowling greens and cricket grounds. Kikuyu is ideally suited to humid areas, although very aggressive, while the various types of bent grass thrive in cooler parts. The lawns of the big English estates were usually of bent, which was enough to recommend it to status-conscious colonials.

By the late '40s, with a suburban building boom in progress, lawns were more in favour than ever. "In preparing to lay out the front garden," advised The Practical Home Gardener in 1955, "remember that the greater the stretch of unbroken lawn present the more spacious and finished will be the final appearance of the garden."

Few home gardeners would have disagreed, especially now that extra lawn no longer meant more back-breaking work, since, in 1952, a Sydney backyard inventor, Mervyn Victor Richardson, assembled a small motor and a peach tin on wheels and advertised the result in the classifieds: "For Sale. Victa 18 inch rotary mower. 1 hp petrol engine. Cuts to fence and any height of grass, weeds, etc. Safe for 10 year olds. #39.16.0 plus tax."

Contrary to popular belief, Richardson did not invent the rotary mower, which had been patented in England nearly 20 years earlier. Nevertheless, the Victa turned him into a millionaire. It was light, easy to use and to maintain, although early models were definitely not safe for 10-year-olds. The professionals might well have been sniffy, but the Victa was just what home gardeners had been waiting for.

Its lightness and manoeuvrability suited it to small areas dotted with obstacles, where ease and speed more than compensated for its rough cut. Nothing stood in its way - pinebark scattered by the blackbirds, dogs' bones, socks fallen from the clothesline, hoses and children's toys were all shredded effortlessly - and nothing could so effectively annoy the neighbours at 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning. The Victa changed lawn mowing from a gentlemanly art of beautification into a blood sport.

All innovations in the '60s were aimed at making lawn care easier, rather than improving quality - a sure sign that lawns were losing their privileged status. Instant lawn, now delivered in rolls rather than squares, finally found a market towards the end of the decade. The electric Flymo air-cushion mower made its appearance in 1964, enjoying considerable popularity for a time. "It is ideal for use by women or those no longer so young", reported Your Garden magazine in an article headed "Let Mum Mow". Soon word got around that if Mum sliced through the cord she would be electrocuted, and who would cook dinner then? Sales fell dramatically. It's a prejudice that electric mowers have been trying to overcome since.

For years, adventurous garden designers had been trying to wean Australians off their lawns, proposing easier and more environmentally responsible alternatives. As far back as the 1870s the English garden writer William Robinson had railed against mowing, recommending waving grass meadows instead, which were not really an option for suburban blocks. In the '30s, alpine ground covers, thyme and prostrate rosemary were recommended as lawn alternatives. Your Garden, in 1968, suggested camomile, in response to what was then one of the worst droughts on record. "Lawns, it seems to me, are against nature, barren and often threadbare - the enemy of a good garden," pronounced the fashionable English filmmaker, artist and gardener Derek Jarman, and liberated souls around the world nodded their agreement.

But if lawns are against nature, they can at least be art. The recent revival of the grass parterre is an example. This is a design created by cutting certain areas higher than others; usually geometric in the past but more likely to be free-form today. The effect is especially pleasing when the lawn is filled with daisies or daffodils for colour as well as texture in the raised parts. The attraction of the grass parterre is that it provides an opportunity to modernise the lawn to give its archaic image a bit of a shake-up.

Chris Parsons, an Englishman, has developed the idea to new heights of evanescence. Rising before dawn, he creates intricate geometric patterns by dragging a rag brush across the dewy surfaces of bowling greens. The dew gardens, as he calls them, last just a couple of hours before the sun melts them away - a touching reminder that all gardens are ephemeral.

Nevertheless, the battle against the lawn may already have been won by default. For years its status as an Australian suburban icon has been fading, not just because of vilification by those who don't appreciate its value, but because of shrinking house blocks, bigger houses, more concrete for cars and less inclination among homeowners to look after it.

Decline is almost always accompanied by nostalgia for what is being lost. And there can be no better illustration than the large open grass plot on the 10th level of Freshwater Place, a 60-storey apartment block at Melbourne's Southbank. The developers recognise that city apartment dwellers yearn for the smell of freshly cut grass and the sound of the motor mower, which they associate with idyllic suburban childhoods. Freshwater's lawn is cut at a specified time every Sunday so residents can come to watch and weep. "It's that type of village feeling or emotion we're trying to develop on the banks of the Yarra," the developer says. "It's a recognition that the traditional home-owning values remain important in an apartment context."

Here, on the 10th floor at Freshwater, Capability Brown comes full circle: the lawn as a private spectacle for well-off folk with lingering insecurities about their future place in the economic order, who hanker after some sort of emotional foothold and think they can achieve it by paying someone to provide the trappings. It's touching, isn't it, that the developers seized on the smell of freshly cut grass and the roar of the mower as the most potent symbols of the suburban idyll. And very perceptive of them as well.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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