Sir Henry Wooton, diplomat, Provost of Eton, angler, scholar, poet, spent most of his adult life serving his country’s interests in the capitals of Europe. He studied our neighbours closely, learned their languages, became familiar with their habits, and concluded, with that quiet, unassailable certitude which over the centuries so impressed and irritated those who encountered it: ‘In our own country there is a delicate and diligent curiosity surely without parallel among foreign nations.’ Another eminent and complacent polymath, Sir William Temple, identified evidence of that divinely bestowed pre-eminence:
Besides the temper of our climate, there are two things particular to us that contribute much to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf … which cannot be found in France or Holland as we have it, the soil not admitting that fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that greenness in France …
Pepys subscribed wholeheartedly to what had clearly become a general assumption: ‘We have the best gravel walks in the world, France having none nor Italy; and the green of our bowling alleys is better than any they have.’
Is it any wonder that, meeting such impregnable smugness, visitors from continental Europe should have been moved to occasional outbursts against English arrogance? The paradox – one might say the hypocrisy – of this island pride is that it should have been accompanied by an extremely enlightened openness to Continental influence; an eagerness to purloin, adapt and improve upon the discoveries of others, and then pass them off as Anglo-Saxon inspirations. The extent to which post-Restoration garden design in England was shaped by, even copied from, the example realized with such overpowering magnificence in France is a matter hotly and inconclusively debated by the historians. The prosecution case is persuasive, resting as it does on the certain facts that, as a cousin of Louis XIV and a frequent visitor to his court during the years of exile, Charles II must have observed the unfolding in the Tuileries of André Le Nôtre’s grandiose geometric vision of a royal garden; that, on becoming king, Charles asked his cousin if he might borrow Le Nôtre, then engaged at Fontainebleau; that, although Le Nôtre probably never came, his precepts were put into practice at St James’s Park by André Mollet, whose father had worked with Le Nôtre.
The French tradition was founded on a delight in, and dependence on, geometric patterns. The lines are drawn by channels of water, by hedges and avenues of trees, by paths – all of undeviating straightness. Within the angles of intersection are arranged in symmetrical harmony all manner of attractions: fountains, flower beds, arbours, pools, grass plots and so on. All are where they are according to a grand design. For the first time, the garden becomes an overt statement of Man’s ambition and ability to control the world around him and make it reflect his image. In the case of the gardens of the Sun King, it may well be that what seems to us now their chilly and regimented splendour was the projection of the proprietor rather than their designer. But since neither Louis nor Le Nôtre – nor indeed, I’m sorry to say, King Charles – evinced any interest in the cultivation of grass, we need not dwell on their ambitions.
Others were more enlightened, and inclined to resist the French model. John Worlidge, in his Art of Gardening (1677) bemoaned the influence of the ‘new, useless and unpleasant mode’, denounced the banishment of ‘garden flowers, the miracles of nature’, contending that the French system of gravel walks and grass plots was fit for kings and princes only. He celebrated the delight taken in their gardens by Englishmen of all classes, the noble in his country seat, the shopkeeper with his ‘boxes, pots and other receptacles, plants etc.’, the cottage dweller with his ‘proportionable garden’.
Worlidge was an early pragmatist. Far removed from court circles, free from any need to fawn and flatter, he knew perfectly well that the vast spread of Versailles with its armies of gardeners was no sort of an example for an Englishman. For him gardening’s proper companion was common sense rather than high ambition. His approach – and that of his equally sensible contemporary, John Rea – was severely practical. Rea’s Flora of 1665 honoured on an epic scale the glories of flower, plant and fruit (the fashionable delight in patterns of grass and gravel, to the exclusion of all else, he damned as ‘an immoral nothing’).
Buried within its mass of instruction is some scanty advice about laying turf with a turfing iron, and disciplining it with a ‘heavy, broad Beater’. Rea’s tips echo those in the other influential guide of the time, John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense. Evelyn is remembered these days, if at all, for his voluminous diary which was discovered in an old clothes basket at his home more than a hundred years after his death. In his time he was famed as the first great advocate of tree planting, and a dispenser of generally sound, if exceedingly wordy, gardening lore. He tells the lawnsman that in October ‘it will now be good to beat, roll and mow … for the ground is supple and it will even all inequalities’.
It is improbable that a rich landowner such as Evelyn, or literate gentlemen such as Rea and Worlidge, would have done anything more strenuous in their gardens than giving the orders; so perhaps we should excuse their reticence on technical matters, annoying though it is. Beating was done with a mallet, rolling with a roller not materially different from our own. Mowing deserves a closer look.
The word is Old English, the science as ancient as the most ancient Egyptians, who used a sickle adapted from an animal’s jawbone to harvest their corn. The Romans used a one-handed implement and stooped to cut. But the Englishman of the Middle Ages preferred to stand up straight, wielding a scythe almost as long as himself. It had two handles attached to its slightly curved willow snead, and a long blade of soft metal at right angles, which was sharpened with a block of sandstone.
Efficient scything demanded – beyond the stamina to keeping swinging through the long days of harvest-time – precision, dexterity and a harmony between man, his tool and his task. Until the machine age consigned him to redundancy, the scytheman was highly valued, and there was a romantic appeal to him and his labour. His oneness with landscape excited writers seeking to distil its essence; most notably Tolstoy, who devoted a memorable passage in Anna Karenina to Levin’s spiritual flight into the boundless golden cornfields, where – scythe in hand – he mixed his sweat with that of the serfs as he tasted again the old bond with Mother Earth.
On a more modest scale, the poet Andrew Marvell explored the metaphorical possibilities:
I am the mower, Damon, known
Through all the meadows I have mown.
Despite presumably well-paid work and a healthy outdoor way of life, Damon is not happy. Love, of course, has made him so:
Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was
And wither’d like his Hopes the Grass.
Marvell makes play with his conceit:
… she
What I do to the grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
The poem reaches an absurd climax, as:
The edged Stele by careless chance
Did into his Ankle glance.
The physical hurt Damon repairs, with ‘Shepherd’s-purse and Clowns-all-heal’. But there is a deeper cut, for which no cure this side of the grave can heal:
Til death has done that this must do,
For