that spirit was rarely exercised by the matter of grass. There was, however, one notable exception.
The authentic voice of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England is that of Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans, one of the numerous distinctions of whose life was that it was ended by a chill caught while he was stuffing a dead fowl with snow to observe the effect of cold on the preservation of flesh. It is characteristic of the elasticity of Bacon’s mind that, in the midst of half a lifetime’s unscrupulous and serpentine manoeuvrings at court – whose sole guiding principle was the promotion of his own interests – he should have published his Essays, or Counsell Civill and Morall, which amounted to a manual of spiritual and cultural self-improvement. The range of these homilies, the richness of the learning they display, and the elegance of their prose, are amazing. But equally remarkable is the tone, its authority and confidence. Whether in routing the atheists, measuring the usefulness of novelties, or analysing the fruits of friendship, this supreme know-all is immune to the very notion of uncertainty.
Bacon’s intellectual arrogance is on magnificent display in his famous essay ‘Of Gardens’. In considering the garden, he does not stoop to concern himself with anything so mundane as the growing of things. His mind is on the moral dimension. The garden is, he asserts, ‘the purest of human pleasures … the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man’. ‘When ages grow to civility and elegance, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely as if gardening were the greater perfection.’ The regulations are set out with impregnable assurance. Bacon scorns knots with ‘diverse coloured earths’ as toys. Images cut in juniper or ‘other garden stuff’ are for children. Aviaries are impermissible. Pools ‘marr all and make the garden unwholesome and full of frogs and flies’. The main garden must be square, surrounded by a ‘stately arched hedge’, with turrets above the arches to contain bird-cages. At each end of the side gardens there should be a mound, breast high; and at the centre of the whole thing, another, thirty feet high, with three ascents, each broad enough for four to walk abreast; and within the hedged alleys should be gravelled walks (not grass, which would be ‘going wet’).
Bacon’s ideal Eden in St Albans – it’s difficult to imagine him or anyone else actually creating and maintaining such an exorbitance – covered thirty acres. There were three essential elements: at the far end, a natural wilderness devoid of trees but rampant with thickets of sweet briar and honeysuckle; in the middle, the main garden; at the entrance, the green. Here is our first true English lawn:
The green hath two pleasures, the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge which is to enclose the garden.
That is all. There is no hint as to how the precept is to be realized. The fount of wisdom does not dirty his hands with practical tips. For those we must consult our plodding friend, Gervase Markham. And in any case, it seems most improbable that this four acres of perfect turf ever existed outside Bacon’s imagination. That is not the point. The significance of Bacon’s essay on gardens lies, not in any practical application, but in the fact that he wrote it. It proves that, by the turn of the 16th century, the cultured Englishman’s apprehension of how to express himself included the concept of the decorative garden, and that an expanse of cultivated grass was fundamental to that concept. By and large, it has remained so ever since. And as Englishmen took ever greater pride in their Englishness, developing as a national pastime the habit of comparing themselves favourably to foreigners, so did they learn to see grass, not merely as a contributor to the beauty and harmony of the pleasure garden but, as of itself, another symbol and symptom of English superiority.
Sir Henry Wooton, diplomat, Provost of Eton, angler, scholar, poet, spent most of his adult life serving his country’s interests in the capitals of Europe. He studied our neighbours closely, learned their languages, became familiar with their habits, and concluded, with that quiet, unassailable certitude which over the centuries so impressed and irritated those who encountered it: ‘In our own country there is a delicate and diligent curiosity surely without parallel among foreign nations.’ Another eminent and complacent polymath, Sir William Temple, identified evidence of that divinely bestowed pre-eminence:
Besides the temper of our climate, there are two things particular to us that contribute much to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf … which cannot be found in France or Holland as we have it, the soil not admitting that fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that greenness in France …
Pepys subscribed wholeheartedly to what had clearly become a general assumption: ‘We have the best gravel walks in the world, France having none nor Italy; and the green of our bowling alleys is better than any they have.’
Is it any wonder that, meeting such impregnable smugness, visitors from continental Europe should have been moved to occasional outbursts against English arrogance? The paradox – one might say the hypocrisy – of this island pride is that it should have been accompanied by an extremely enlightened openness to Continental influence; an eagerness to purloin, adapt and improve upon the discoveries of others, and then pass them off as Anglo-Saxon inspirations. The extent to which post-Restoration garden design in England was shaped by, even copied from, the example realized with such overpowering magnificence in France is a matter hotly and inconclusively debated by the historians. The prosecution case is persuasive, resting as it does on the certain facts that, as a cousin of Louis XIV and a frequent visitor to his court during the years of exile, Charles II must have observed the unfolding in the Tuileries of André Le Nôtre’s grandiose geometric vision of a royal garden; that, on becoming king, Charles asked his cousin if he might borrow Le Nôtre, then engaged at Fontainebleau; that, although Le Nôtre probably never came, his precepts were put into practice at St James’s Park by André Mollet, whose father had worked with Le Nôtre.
The French tradition was founded on a delight in, and dependence on, geometric patterns. The lines are drawn by channels of water, by hedges and avenues of trees, by paths – all of undeviating straightness. Within the angles of intersection are arranged in symmetrical harmony all manner of attractions: fountains, flower beds, arbours, pools, grass plots and so on. All are where they are according to a grand design. For the first time, the garden becomes an overt statement of Man’s ambition and ability to control the world around him and make it reflect his image. In the case of the gardens of the Sun King, it may well be that what seems to us now their chilly and regimented splendour was the projection of the proprietor rather than their designer. But since neither Louis nor Le Nôtre – nor indeed, I’m sorry to say, King Charles – evinced any interest in the cultivation of grass, we need not dwell on their ambitions.
Others were more enlightened, and inclined to resist the French model. John Worlidge, in his Art of Gardening (1677) bemoaned the influence of the ‘new, useless and unpleasant mode’, denounced the banishment of ‘garden flowers, the miracles of nature’, contending that the French system of gravel walks and grass plots was fit for kings and princes only. He celebrated the delight taken in their gardens by Englishmen of all classes, the noble in his country seat, the shopkeeper with his ‘boxes, pots and other receptacles, plants etc.’, the cottage dweller with his ‘proportionable garden’.
Worlidge was an early pragmatist. Far removed from court circles, free from any need to fawn and flatter, he knew perfectly well that the vast spread of Versailles with its armies of gardeners was no sort of an example for an Englishman. For him gardening’s proper companion was common sense rather than high ambition. His approach – and that of his equally sensible contemporary, John Rea – was severely practical. Rea’s Flora of 1665 honoured on an epic scale the glories of flower, plant and fruit (the fashionable delight in patterns of grass and gravel, to the exclusion of all else, he damned as ‘an immoral nothing’).
Buried within its mass of instruction
