I'm not going to argue with that. It has an element of truth to it, but it is not the whole story. That strategy will work fine for situations where the state of the grass doesn't matter, which may be any garden from let's say the 1980's onwards. Perhaps 1990's. Depends when you think environmentalism began to catch on in a generalised way. However, in a 1930's garden, brown, bare grass wouldn't be countenanced. And when the whole presentation depends on that pristine, weed-free sward laying down its carpet to set off your beautiful plantings, then water comes into consideration. Because now we are entering the realm of historical accuracy.
While it may be acceptable, or even seasonally attractive for your turf to turn yellow on the 100-acre view of an 18th century landscape garden, applying a scorched-earth policy to a 1930's formal garden, laid out with fine-turf paths in some cases no more than a metre wide, is a very different proposition. Nobody suggests you should turn off the heating in your leaky historic house on environmental grounds, because that would lead to damage to contents. I'm all for the Beth Chatto approach, with her zero-water dry garden. It is the perfect solution to the desert conditions of Essex, and is the correct modern way to solve a problem of today. Grow the plants to suit the conditions, rather than change the conditions to suit the plants. However, if your task is preserving something different, something with historic importance with a different past, then other rules must apply.
Quite simply, a grass path will not stand up to wear unless it is growing vigorously. It needs water for that. And a lawn which dries out, does not recover completely. The regrowth will be patchy. Coarse grasses, mosses and weeds will creep in the following year. And your grass is meant to look perfect, so to regain that quality, you are then forced to reseed, eradicate weeds, top-dress, cultivate. All of these actions will have an environmental impact, not least the eradication of weeds. So you have to think in terms of balance. Is it perhaps not better to squander water in order to save on chemicals and tractor exhausts belching diesel fumes into the air? My view was that it was always less damaging to preserve what we already had, than to recover it once it was lost. and the place looked better for it through the period of stress, and maintained the interest of visitors. This in turn brought us the income needed to continue the improvements. There is no point stepping forward, only to have to step the same distance back.
Watering is not a recovery procedure, though. If you wait till the ground has dried out completely before you start, then the water runs off and deposits itself somewhere lower down where you don't need it. That's where water goes of its own accord when it's not wanted. So, it is a matter of being on the lookout for what the weather will do, not reacting to what it has already done. You must start your watering before the garden is lolling its tongue on the ground, gasping. You must do it while there is enough moisture in the soil to facilitate the uptake of more, and preferably you should do it at night, when it is cool and less evaporation will take place. We couldn't afford pop-up sprinklers on a timer everywhere, although eventually we had a system installed which watered the main terrace at night. The rest we still had to do with hoses and percussion sprinklers dragged out every day and set up where needed. Once set up, we then had to leave them to do their job for enough hours to thoroughly soak in before moving them on. It used to take weeks to get round the whole garden, which is another reason why it was important to start early, otherwise we would already have lost some areas before even reaching them with the hoses. We also had underground irrigation in another area of the garden, which I will describe in due course. This cuts out the evaporation factor altogether, putting the water directly at the roots, but we didn't use it on turf.
So far so good. I was trying my best to minimise the environmental impact of running an old-fashioned garden. I am a good guy, but I was also conscious of the compromises I was making. I was always on the look-out for any new developments in horticultural science which would help. So was the organisation I worked for. Sometimes they were ahead of me on the path to righteousness, and sometimes I was ahead of the game. Let it be known here, that I took the garden into the peat-free arena in my first year there. I think ours may have been the first garden in the organisation to go down this route. I don't know. We never found out, because we did it quietly, without a fuss, in 1991. Of course, being pioneers, we found that our path wasn't easy. It was still impossible to buy the plants we needed from suppliers who were prepared to use peat-free composts. In fact, at the time, the trade was very reluctant to risk profitability by experimenting. It was much later that the organisation was able to find enough peat-free suppliers, or to provide plants from its own nursery, so that we could all be sure that even our imported plants were not stripping wetland habitats.
We began to make our own composts, starting with coir. Ours came ground to dust, like Turkish coffee, stained your hands permanently and watering it was an unpredictable general disaster. So we started mixing our own from bark, leaf-mould and soil that we sterilised ourselves in a hot box that would hold a couple of sackfuls. It was variable in quality, but it worked. And we never again reverted to the old ways. Told you. I'm a good guy. And I remain one, despite Donald Trump across the Atlantic, and despite uncountable, unspeakable unfairnesses practised in the political sphere here on our own poor island. I still have faith that we have the ability to find a solution to all these affronts. We will come down in favour of renewable energy. We will make chemicals unnecessary in the culture of plants, even on a field scale. We will find innovative solutions to the global water crisis. You can be a good guy too. But you can't have it all at once. It's a process. We learn from the history I had the privilege of preserving. And if we learn enough, and apply science to it, then we grow beyond it, and can keep it going without future damage. Yet still it will be there for all to see, in perpetuity, properly managed. Let's all be good guys, build the future while preserving and learning from the past. End of sermon. Amen.
But it makes a dynamic picture, doesn't it? I feel that hot morning in the pores of my flesh even now, looking at it. A wistful nostalgia creeps across me for those long, hot summer days when I was earning a living making something truly beautiful. If that wasn't a good life, then I wouldn't know where to look to find one.
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