While thus he threw his Elbow round,
Depopulating all the ground, And, with his whistling scythe does cut Each stroke between the Earth and Root
– are the closest to a description of 17th-century scything that I have been able to discover; and, of course, refer to corn and meadow grass rather than anyone’s grass plot. Clues about the tending of these are provided in a collection of drawings of garden tools executed by Evelyn to illustrate what was to have been his life’s crowning work, his Elysium Britannicum, a survey of his native land and its achievements envisaged on such a massive scale that his energies were exhausted before it had advanced much beyond the planning stage. These include a group of implements for the lawn: a turf-lifter, a turf-edger and a scythe.
We must assume that this was how it was done. That it was done, that by the end of the 17th century the cultivation of fine grass in the form of bowling green or ornamental lawn had become general practice in the gardens of the great and the rich, is given some circumstantial weight by the accounts of that endlessly curious and untiring traveller, Celia Fiennes. In Mrs Stevens’s ‘neat gardens’ at Epsom, she found six grass walks guarded by dwarf fruit trees; at Durdans in Surrey ‘three long grass walks which are also very broad’; at Woburn a large bowling green with eight arbours, and a seat in a high tree where she sat and ate ‘a great quantity of the Red Carolina gooseberry’. Visiting New College, Oxford, in 1694, Miss Fiennes much admired a great mound ‘ascended by degrees in a round of green paths’, and noted a bowling green.
Thirty years later the celebrated Oxford antiquarian Thomas Hearne lamented the rage for lawns. He noted sourly in his journal the destruction of the ‘fine, pleasant garden’ at Brasenose ‘purely to turn it into a grass plot and erect some silly statue there’. As early as the 1670s, Christchurch, richest and grandest of the Oxford colleges, had enclosed a smooth, green lawn intersected by gravel paths, and reached by a noble flight of baroque steps. The fellows of Pembroke had their bowling green, while at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton’s feet trod soft turf as his mind wrestled with the mysteries of gravitational pull and refrangibility.
It would be absurd to pretend that the gardeners of the later Stuart period were at all excited by the subject of grass culture – or, I suppose, to suggest that the real gardeners of any period have been. Thus, despite Sir William Temple’s already quoted tribute to English turf, it does not figure in his long, lyrical description of the garden at Moor Park where he spent his honeymoon in 1655: the ‘perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw’, with its gravelled terrace running along the house, its three flights of steps down to a rectangular parterre quartered by gravel walks and bounded by cloisters, its grotto, fountains, statues, summer house, abundance of fruit trees and marked absence of flowers. The gardens of the Russells at Woburn at least boasted that bowling green. But it was the flower and vegetable gardens, and particularly the orchards (in 1674 fifteen different species of plum and twelve of pear were planted) which received the attention of the head gardener, John Field.
Passion was excited by the great advances in the science of botany and the ever-increasing availability of new plants. That ardour for the new triggered by pioneers such as the Tradescants, father and son, had enormously expanded the horticultural horizon. But on the whole, the grandees who commissioned the great gardens were not that exercised by subtle distinctions between varieties of gillyflower or nasturtium (although tulips, notoriously, were another matter). They were more inclined to involve themselves in novelties such as statuary and hydraulic engineering, and, in particular, topiary. The new king and queen, William and Mary, had brought with them from Holland their fondness for evergreen hedges and bushes, which clamoured for some artist with a pair of shears to work them into a resemblance of a camel or a griffin or some other diverting shape.
The desire common to the great men, of course, was that their trappings – including their gardens – should reflect and display their greatness. As is the way with the species, whatever image of greatness one great man presented to the world, another would seek to surpass it. Few strove harder, at greater expense and with more magnificent if ridiculous results, than James Brydges, successively Lord Chandos, Earl of Carnarvon, Viscount Wilton and Duke of Chandos, whose name is perpetuated in the series of anthems written in his honour by Handel.
The man who thought nothing of commissioning the greatest composer of the age to sing his praises had a home to match his estimation of his own importance, and gardens in proportion. The main parterre at Canons in Middlesex was studded with life-size statues, most prominent among them a gladiator who stood beside a canal fed with water piped from springs at Stanmore two miles away. The divisions of the parterre, most unusually, were of decorative ironwork. Vegetables were grown under beehives of glass. At the end of each of the eight intersecting alleys was a lodging for a retired army sergeant who, together, formed a guard for the place. There were flamingos, ostriches and blue macaws, and eagles which drank from stone basins. Tortoises from Majorca crept through the undergrowth, in little danger of straying outside the boundaries of an estate each of whose main avenues of trees was more than half a mile long. And there was turf at Canons, grown from seed imported, for reasons which remain obscure, from Aleppo. It must have thrived and been extensive, for when Chandos’s fortunes were at their zenith, it was scythed three times a week and weeded daily.
Miles Hadfield suggests a close correspondence between the layout of the gardens at Canons and an influential book entitled The Theory and Practice of Gardening, first published in 1713 under the name John James, for many years Clerk to the Works at Greenwich. This was, in fact, a fairly close translation of a work by a Parisian, Antoine Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville, who had studied with a pupil of the great Le Nôtre, and was, therefore, a textbook for an essentially French school of design.
To be honest, there is little pleasure to be had from studying The Theory and Practice today. It is as short on charm and humour as Hillard and Botting’s First Latin Primer. But one can understand why John James’s cluster of aristocratic subscribers were so taken with it. It presents, not reflections or suggestions or philosophical aspirations, but prescriptions, precisely plotted and illustrated with encyclopaedic thoroughness. There are pages and pages of elaborate designs to choose from, which offer – or appear to – a guarantee of success. At the same time, the book does have, in its pedagogic fashion, dirty fingers. The nobleman, desirous of stamping the reflection of his nobility on his domain, might select a suitable rectangular plan. His head gardener, assuming he could read, could then learn how to put it all into practice. No one before had made available such a reliable, all-encompassing code of gardening conduct.
Anyone interested in the evolution of the lawn and grass culture has particular reason to be grateful to Mr James of Greenwich, for he tackles the subject with great thoroughness – or, perhaps, one should say that D’Argenville does. But, curiously enough, while the main design fundamentals expounded in The Theory and Practice are undoubtedly French in origin and inspiration, the section dealing with grass is not. D’Argenville graciously concedes the case:
You cannot do better than follow the method used in England, where their grass plots are of so exquisite a beauty that in France we can scarcely hope to come up with it.
The essence of the overall doctrine is what James calls ‘contrariety’ – the ‘placing and distributing the several parts of the garden always to oppose them one to the other’. It would be tedious to delve into the detail of its application. Suffice to say that the importance of turf is properly recognized. ‘A bowling green’, James reflects, ‘is one of the most agreeable compartments of a garden and when ’tis rightly placed, nothing is more pleasant to the eye.’ It demands, he adds, ‘a beautiful carpet of turf very smooth and of a lovely green’. He proceeds to a succession of alternative plans, each presented with immense care. In one, the square of the green is edged in box and pierced with a star of paths, with a rounded hollow at the centre. Another is oval, ‘cut in Carts to make a diversity’. There is a Great Bowling Green, ‘adorned with a Buffet of Water made against the slope’; and an even greater one with compartments ‘cut and tied together by Knots and Cartoozes of Embroidery, very delicate’.
In