Here is one of those rare demonstrations that almost any subject at all can make a beguiling book if it is motivated by genuine enthusiasm, the research is imaginative and thorough, and the prose is stylish. Tom Fort of BBC Radio News, also the fishing correspondent of The Financial Times, in this charmingly unnecessary yet ardent summertime essay on lawns and lawnmowers, conjures up a multitude of green thoughts in a green shade. Marvellous! A jacket photograph shows him looking as boyishly uncombed and cheerful as Michael Palin. However, Fort evidently writes with deliberate care. The sound construction of his sentences suggests that his formative years were not without Latin.
How grass in its natural state has been tamed, enriched and refined over the centuries to produce the lawn becomes in Fort's vision a synecdochic symbol of the develpment of civilisation. "From the earliest times," he writes, "green . . . symbolised rebirth, resurrection, fertility, happiness both temporal and spiritual. Brides in ancient Palestine wore green. The green of the Prophet Mohammed's cloak and of the banner beneath which he and his followers marched was the green of hope."
The therapeutic and aesthetic values of cultivated greenery were soon recognised in both ecclesiastical and secular institutions. "In the records of the great monastery at Clairvaux," Fort points out, "the sick man is seated upon a green lawn, and `for the comfort of his pain all kinds of grass are fragrant in his nostrils . . . the lovely green of herb and tree nourishes his eyes'."
In his elegantly succinct historical survey of horticulture, Fort cites the year 1260 as a key date, for it was then that a Dominican friar, Albertus Magnus, Count of Bollstadt, wrote the first book on gardening, De Vegetabilis, with instructions on how to make a lawn by weeding and flooding the site, laying turves and flattening them, that the grass might "spring forth and closely cover the surface like a green cloth".
Fort interprets the geometric patterns of traditional French gardens as "an overt statement of Man's ambition and ability to control the world around him and make it reflect his image". But ornamental gardens were luxuries enjoyed almost exclusively by the rich of all countries until the end of the 18th century. Plebeians fortunate enough to possess plots of land used them mainly for growing food.
Before the Industrial Revolution grass-cutting was done with scythes, which was hard labour, or done only by sheep. The next historical date which glows with a sort of holy fire is 1830, when John Ferrabee patented the first mechanical lawnmower, designed by Edwin Budding, and converted England into a nation of lawn obsessives. Think of the bowling greens, croquet lawns, cricket pitches, golf courses, the hallowed Centre Court at Wimbledon (before the tennis spoils it), and all the public parks and private gardens! Buildings seem to be mere annexes; every lawn requires its support system.
Fort writes of his own obsession - his love of well-groomed verdure and his reverence for the great lawn-mowing machines - with the passion of a connoisseur. Yes, there are frivolous asides, but they do not disguise his true feelings. He praises "the most superb sweep of turf imaginable", the grass that "helps give Stowe its nobility". He praises the Great Lawn at St John's College, Oxford, 180 yards long and 100 yards wide, established in gardens designed 200 years ago by Capability Brown, and now "scarified, hoovered, solid-tined, hollow-tined, autumn fed, spring fed, rolled, weeded and mown and mown and mown".
He describes in technical detail the improvements that have been made in lawnmowers since early models as ponderous as Great War tanks. He makes a catalogue of brand names resonate like a roll of honour. He pays tribute to the Old Lawnmowers Club and the Hall Duck collection of vintage mowers. There are illustrations. His eulogies almost inspired me to cut the grass.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic