Day 34 - Terrifying and moaning

Well, we kept at it for fifteen years, feeding and mowing, scarifying and slitting, and all that, and even on my last day I wasn't satisfied. The lawns had had so many years of poor maintenance that they would take a lifetime to rescue. This was compounded by steadily increasing visitor numbers putting the turf under more stress every year.

Visitors would approach me with a wide grin and say, 'your lawns are marvellous. Like a bowling green', and then they would go and ruin it by adding, 'so lovely and springy underfoot.' I would have liked a grin-wiper for every time someone said that to me. Springy in a lawn means thatch and moss. It means you haven't achieved the optimum. It might feel sensual for the barefoot hippie, but it doesn't mean you have a good lawn in the best of health and beautifully maintained.

I found out in the autumn of my first year that one of the problems was that clearly no one who worked here had known the fine points of good turf maintenance. For fifty years the grass had been mown in one direction only, longitudinally, to minimise the amount of turns and to accentuate the linearity of the layout. Every stripe had been repeatedly pushed in the same direction up to forty times a year for the last half-century. We had our blades set to cut to a height of half an inch, but when we came to scarify, we discovered that much of the grass was nine inches long, and pressed flat, with only the last half-inch turned up to face the mower. Good job the scarifying was done after the end of the open season, because the place looked a mess afterwards, with coarse, stringy stems cut off in their prime and much of the green removed. But it had to be done.

When it comes to terrifying your lawn, as I preferred to call it after this experience, it does not pay to be timid. You should not set your blades to go deeper than soil level, but they should just touch the surface to ensure that they pull out the maximum of thatch. Do not be frightened of the amount of spoil it brings up. We used to scarify in four directions, our problem was so bad, and each pass brought out a huge amount of waste material. Here is the tennis court getting its second raking of the day -

Obviously, I had to initiate some changes to the regime to stop the problems being compounded in the future. There was little point in dethatching, only to continue to push the lawn in the same direction as always. In a major change to the status quo, I insisted that in future we would be mowing in four different directions in consecutive weeks, which we termed long-ways, short-ways, and two diagonals. Needless to say, this was yet another unpopular iconoclasm that no doubt stimulated much complaint behind the scenes, but its validity proved itself the first time we tried to go against the grain. As we mowed across the path of the stripes, the mower would be dragged first to the left and then to the right, wavering uncontrollably with every stripe it crossed. It took years to tear and mow out this bias and achieve proper straight lines in all directions. And the grass continued to prostrate itself in the direction it had always been mown in, until we finally forced it to surrender.

Eventually we were able to achieve lawns that looked like this -

And this -

And this -

And this -

And this -

Now I know there is a tendency in modern gardens to ignore the impact of a good lawn. I know there is a school of thought that says, 'as long as it's green, it's fine', but when you see a good expanse of turf and how it sets off the rest of the planting, and compare it with the 'it's ok, it's green' type, there is absolutely no contest in my book. Not only that, but I personally don't know how to be satisfied with less than perfection. Even if I know that I can't ever achieve it, I will keep on striving. I sincerely believe the modern way with grass in gardens is the result of laziness, of the body, the mind and the eye. Gardeners often don't like doing turf work. It is hard, it is repetitive, it is boring. It takes you away from the fancy touches we all like to be involved with. But, oh, how it enhances those embellishments when you get it right.

The other thing that mitigates against intensive turf maintenance nowadays is the environmental difficulties it brings. I get that. Everybody knows that a traditionally-managed golf course is the most sterile, polluting, green leisure facility there is.  But given the choice of giving up on high standards, and working to find methods of achieving them in a non-destructive way, I'll opt for the hard road any time.

I cut this out of the paper years ago. Don't know who to credit for it, but didn't feel I could leave it out.