Juniper Bonsai Trees

More immediately, our lawns—like so much of our horticultural baggage—come to us from Great Britain. Rather than model our gardens after the Spanish (who use paving for the flat spaces) or Chinese gardens (which have no flat spaces), we follow the English pattern.
Britain’s climate is perfectly suited to lawn-growing.

Summers never get as hot or as dry there as they do almost everywhere on this continent. It’s the latitude: England being farther north, the grass doesn’t fry in the summer as it does in most of the United States. (Of course, the hotter it gets here, the more one craves a cool verdant carpet to wriggle one’s toes in.)

“For some time now I’ve been increasingly convinced that the world would be a better place for gardeners if Edwin Budding and Justus Liebig, two nineteenth-century gentlemen with bright ideas, hadn’t let these ideas loose in public.

Budding, an English engineer, invented the lawnmower, a device to keep grass short. Liebig, a German professor of science, invented chemical fertilizer, a means to make it grow faster.”

Allen Lacy, Home Ground

The original English lawnswere cropped by sheep or, in the case of wealthy landholdings, by menials wielding scythes.

Then in 1832 a textile engineer with the fertile name of Edwin Budding had a brainstorm: why not adapt the machines used for cutting the pile on carpeting to cut grass? Eureka, the reel mower. The first ones were large, noisy and cumbersome, but they caught on. In the 1890s steam-powered machines were introduced; in 1902, gasoline, and eventually the rotary blade. (Lawn purists insist that only a reel mower does a proper job.) Nowadays the large, noisy and cumbersome ride-on mower is the most popular machine in the United States.

Americans who visit England grow faint with envy at the smoothness, greenness and weedlessness of the lawns. “Rolling” is supposedly the key—hundreds and hundreds of years of peasants pushing large weighty rollers back and forth on the sod, to achieve that flawless surface.

An English sward is fiat as a billiard table, striped like moire silk, green as an emerald, and apparently weedless.”

Eleanor Perenyi Green Thoughts


On the other hand, the English practice of cutting lawns in stripes looks really odd to an American eye, accustomed to a seamless sward. Those stripes are highly regarded and are achieved by using either an old-fashioned non-motorized reel mower or—this is so English—a rotary machine that makes stripes as if it “Reel mowers evoke nostalgia: for lost summer mornings when one was awakened by the gentle crescendo and diminuendo of their whirring blades, and the perfume of new-mown grass drifted through an open window…Reel mowers clip like fine scissors, rotary ‘flowers more like a saw slashing at the grass and savagely wounding it—good enough if you are reclaiming a piece of prairie and the last thing you need for a domestic lawn.were an old-fashioned reel mower. I have an idea about those stripes: it has to do with floor covering.

In England what we call wall-to-wall carpet (they call it “fitted”) is sold in strips that are placed close together, causing a striped effect like an English lawn. In America carpet is sold by the roll; it is laid down in one piece, with no visible seams, like an American lawn.

The question is: is the lawn mimicking the carpet, or is it the other way around?