Maytime and ‘Some wet, bird-haunted English lawn’
The best thing this country has ever produced is a fine-sown, closely mown and weedless lawn. You really relish it this sunny time of year, when it becomes a work of art, or as Wordsworth put it, ‘a carpet all alive/ With shadows flung from leaves’. I have been thinking about lawns because ours, in London, the green punctuation mark between the steps leading down from my library, and my beloved cedar studio, had become hopelessly overgrown with moss. So a friendly lorry, controlled by a gruff-jovial man and his hard-working daughter, delivered an immense number of sausage-rolls of new turf. Then along came two immensely tall young men — giants — who stripped away the old surface, loaded the detritus into plastic bags, dug up and smoothed the undersurface, and then with exquisite precision laid down the new billiard table. It took them two days of intense industry and impressive skill. I was reminded of Das Rheingold and the two giants, Fasolt and Fafner, building Valhalla as a new home for the gods. And when it was all done, and I could see how beautiful it was, I felt like singing Wotan’s paean, ‘Vollender das ewige Werk!’ Now it is up to me to ensure that this fine artefact of nature and human ingenuity gets the water its thirsty soul craves, so that it binds itself indissolubly with the earth and becomes the green still-centre of the garden, its perpetual curate and tenant-in-chief.
I like the word ‘lawn’; it has a soothing, luxurious sound. Of course it means two disparate things, of quite different origin albeit metaphysically connected. Lawn was a kind of fine linen, a brand name which the great etymologist, Professor Skeat, thought came from the town of Laon in France. Lawn was the material from which, in England, the broad sleeves of the bishops were made. Hence upwardly mobile clergymen spoke of ‘going lawn’ when they expected promotion from a mere canon’s stall to ‘the Bench’, just as half-colonels moving up one rung to full colonel, and being thus entitled to put on scarlet tabs and band round their service hat, boasted of ‘going red’. But lawn was also used for sheets in four-posters in ancient times. Hence the cunning allusion to both meanings of the word in W.H. Auden’s line, written in 1936 when he was urging idealistic youth to fight for the Left in Spain, while he lounged in the gardens of country houses: ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed.’ The garden lawn is a comparatively new philological fixture. Originally ‘lawn’ meant merely open space between wooded areas, a glade (another lovely word). God made these spaces but then gradually, on the instructions of owners, gardeners expanded them into lawns. I suspect the earliest custom-made lawns were used for bowls, originally played on hard earth, like that horrid, noisy game they have in France. Drake was playing on turf at the time he was summoned to beat the Spanish armada, so clearly lawns were spreading by the 1580s. But their expansion was slow. Formal gardens with their box hedges and parterres held them at bay throughout the 17th century, and it was not until Capability Brown parks came in, and gentlemen and their ladies realised how magnificent was a vast expanse of pure-green verdure, that cultivated grass took over.
Not everyone was happy. That fine and underrated poetess Susan Blamire (1747-94) deplored the taming of nature by expensive lawnsmen: ‘We hate the fine lawn and the new-fashion’d planting’. But probably most people welcomed the Big Lawn, and its continuation beyond the ha-ha into parkland kept trim by the busy teeth of voracious sheep. Such extensive grassland made the perfect setting, and still does, for the great Palladian houses. Thus Holkham in Norfolk appears to float like a proud grey-white-andgold ship on a smooth green sea. The same effect was achieved at Kedleston in Derbyshire. This was the house that Dr Johnson, visiting with Boswell, thought too big for domestic comfort though ‘fine for a town hall’, and where later the magnificent George Nathaniel Curzon rebuked the housemaids for not dusting to his satisfaction, bullied his wives for their inadequate flower arrangements (‘Too many lilies — this is not a mausoleum!’) and conducted, as foreign secretary, the affairs of the empire, at the end of a solitary and inaccessible telephone. ‘Do you realise,’ he thundered to a Foreign Office duty clerk one weekend who had called to inform him of the death of a minor Continental sovereign, ‘that to convey to me this trivial piece of information, you have dragged me from one end to another of a house not far short of the dimensions of Windsor Castle?’ But he could calm himself with the lawns: ‘The majestic serenity of the green oceans,’ as he phrased it.
Lawns can be put to many delightful uses, provided there are enough gardeners to repair the damage. Garden parties, tenants’ dinners, sports, both modern and mediaeval (as in Barchester Towers under the antiquarian aegis of Miss Thorne) and that innovation of mid-19th-century Leicestershire, the Lawn Meet. Listing country activities in his novel John Caldigate, Anthony Trollope puts in the usual ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’ but adds ‘lawn billiards’. What was this? A clubman’s croquet? Did you play it with people, as in Alice in Wonderland? One associates lawns with the gentler games. At Stonyhurst, my school, there was a famous circular lawn, near the Observatory, where we bigger boys were allowed to play bowls on special occasions during summer evenings while the shadows lengthened. Then, when it got too dark to play, we would look at the stars through the big telescope. J.B. Priestley had a fine lawn in the gardens of what he called ‘my Regency Mansion’, Kissing Tree House, near Stratfordupon-Avon. I played croquet there partnered by that delectable actress Peggy Ashcroft, with her sly Cleopatra smiles and Pontormo eyes.
Some of the best lawns on earth are the loving handiwork of colleges. Which has the best lawn in Cambridge now — St John’s, King’s or Trinity? At Magdalen, we have admirable stretches of green, pierced by gravel walks, between the 18th-century New Buildings and the late mediaeval cloisters. The fine-mown turf makes a pleasing contrast with the rough grass of the adjoining deer-park. There, in 1947, leaning against the park rails with one of the fellows, Gilbert Ryle, editor of Mind, I espied a sprightly figure prancing jauntily across the lawn. ‘Know who that is?’ asked Ryle. ‘No.’ ‘It’s A.J. Ayer. [Pause.] Might have been a great philosopher. Ruined by sex.’ I gazed enviously at the phenomenon as it vanished through an archway, being then myself more anxious to experience the risk of sexual ruination than the chance to be another Spinoza.
Enjoying lawns is one thing, painting them successfully another. That is why there are so few good pictures of cricket matches. I came across a good one, some years ago, of the Oval, capturing its depth and immensity. But I gave it to the late Sir Paul Getty, that exceptionally generous man, who seldom got presents because people assumed he already had everything. Recently I painted the superb lawn which Henry Keswick has created at Oare. But I only made the picture work by pushing it right down to the bottom of the paper. In lawns, size is important. But green is not a colour an artist can take for a whirl.
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