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• CHAPTER XII •

THE GARDEN

I

In 1730, Queen Caroline of Anspach, the industrious and ever-improving wife of King George II, did a rather daring thing. She ordered the diversion of the little River Westbourne in London to make a large pond in the middle of Hyde Park. The pond, called the Serpentine, is still there and still much admired by visitors, though almost none realize quite how historic a body of water it is.

This was the first manmade pond in the world designed not to look manmade. It is hard to imagine now quite what a radical step this was. Previously, all artificial bodies of water were rigorously geometrical—either boxily rectangular, in the manner of a reflecting pool, or circular, like the Round Pond in neighboring Kensington Gardens, built just two years earlier. Now here was an artificial body of water that was curvilinear and graceful, that meandered beguilingly and looked as if it had been formed, in a moment of careless serendipity, by nature. People were enchanted by the deception and flocked to admire it. The royal family were so pleased that for a time they kept two outsized yachts on the Serpentine even though there was barely space for them to turn without colliding.

For Queen Caroline, it was a rare popular triumph, for her gardening ambitions were often ill-judged. In the same period, she appropriated two hundred acres of Hyde Park for the grounds of Kensington Palace, banishing private citizens from its leafy paths except on Saturdays, and then only for part of the year and only if they looked respectable. This became, not surprisingly, a source of widespread resentment. The queen also toyed with the idea of making the whole of St. James’s Park private, and asked her prime minister, Robert Walpole, how much that would cost. “Only a crown, Madam,” he replied with a thin smile.

So the Serpentine was an immediate success, and the credit for it—certainly for its engineering, probably also for its conception—belongs to a shadowy figure named Charles Bridgeman. Where exactly this man of dashing genius came from has always been a mystery. He appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, in 1709 with a set of signed drawings of an expert caliber for some proposed landscaping works at Blenheim Palace. Everything about him before this is conjectural: where he was born, the timing and circumstances of his upbringing, where he acquired his considerable skills. Historians can’t even agree whether to spell his name Bridgeman or Bridgman. Yet for the thirty years after he came on the scene he was everywhere that gardening of a high order was needed. He worked with all the leading architects—John Vanbrugh, William Kent, James Gibbs, Henry Flitcroft—on projects all over England. He designed and laid out Stowe, the most celebrated garden of the day. He was appointed royal gardener and managed the gardens at Hampton Court, Windsor, Kew, and all the royal parks throughout the king’s domain. He created Richmond Gardens. He designed the Round Pond and Serpentine. He surveyed and designed for estates all over the south of England. Wherever there was important gardening to be done, Bridgeman was there. No individual portrait of him exists, but he does appear, rather unexpectedly, in the second picture of Hogarth’s sequence “The Rake’s Progress,” where he is one of several people, including a tailor, a dancing instructor, and a jockey, importuning the young rake to invest his money with them. Even there, however, Bridgeman looks uncomfortable and stiff, as if he has somehow wandered into the wrong painting.*

Gardening was already a huge business in England when Bridgeman came along. London’s Brompton Park Nursery, which stood on land now occupied by the mighty museums of South Kensington, covered one hundred acres and produced enormous volumes of shrubbery, exotic plants, and other green things for stately homes up and down the country. But these were gardens of a very different type from those we know today. For one thing, they were luridly colorful: paths were filled with colored gravel, statues were brightly painted, bedding plants were chosen for the intensity of their hues. Nothing was natural or understated. Hedges were shaped into galloping topiary. Paths and borders were kept rigorously straight and lined with fastidiously clipped box or yew. Formality ruled. The grounds of stately homes weren’t so much parks as exercises in geometry.

Charles Bridgeman (fourth from left, holding garden plan) in William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Levee. (photo credit 12.1)

Now quite suddenly all of that order and artificiality was being swept away, and the fashion became to make things look natural. Where this impulse came from isn’t at all easy to say. The early eighteenth century was a time when nearly all young men of privileged bearing traveled through Europe on grand tours. Practically without exception they returned home full of enthusiasm for the formal orders of the classical world and a burning desire to reproduce them in an English setting. Architecturally, they longed for nothing more than to be proudly and unimaginatively derivative. Where the grounds were concerned, however, they rejected rigidity and began to build an entirely new kind of world outdoors. For those who believe the British have gardening genius embedded in their chromosomes, this was the age that seemed to prove it.

One of the heroes of this movement was our old friend Sir John Vanbrugh. Because he was self-taught, he was able to bring a fresh perspective to matters. He considered the setting of his houses as no architect had before, for instance. At Castle Howard, almost the first thing he did was rotate the house 90 degrees on its axis, so that it faced north-south rather than east-west, as it had under earlier plans drawn up by William Talman. This made it impossible to provide the traditional long approach to the house, with glimpsed views across fields as a kind of visual foreplay, but had the compensating virtue that the house sat far more comfortably in the landscape and the occupants enjoyed an infinitely more satisfying outlook on the world beyond. This was a radical reversal of traditional orientation. Before this, houses weren’t built to enjoy a view. They were the view.

To maximize important prospects, Vanbrugh introduced another inspired feature—the folly, a building designed with no other purpose in mind than to complete a view and provide a happy spot for the wandering eye to settle. His Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard was the first of its type. To this he added the most ingenious and transformative innovation of all: the ha-ha. A ha-ha is a sunken fence, a kind of palisade designed to separate the private part of an estate from its working parts without the visual intrusion of a conventional fence or hedge. It was an idea adapted from French military fortifications (where Vanbrugh would have first encountered them during his years of imprisonment). Because they were unseen until the last instant, people tended to discover them with a startled cry of “Ha-ha!”—and hence, so it is said, the name. The ha-ha wasn’t simply a practical device for keeping cows off the lawn, but an entirely new way of perceiving the world. Grounds, garden, parkland, estate—all became part of a continuous whole. Suddenly the attractive part of a property didn’t have to end at the lawn’s edge. It could run on to the horizon.

One less happy practice Vanbrugh introduced with Carlisle at Castle Howard was that of razing estate villages and moving the occupants elsewhere if they were deemed to be insufficiently picturesque or intrusive. At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh cleared away not only an existing village but also a church and the ruined castle from which the new house took its name. Soon villages up and down the country were being leveled to make way for more extensive houses and unimpeded views. It was almost as if a rich person couldn’t begin work on a grand house until he had thoroughly disrupted at least a few dozen menial lives. Oliver Goldsmith lamented the practice in a long, sentimental poem, “The Deserted Village,” inspired by a visit to Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire when the first Earl Harcourt was in the process of erasing an ancient village to create a more picturesque space for his new house. Here at least fate exacted an interesting revenge. After completing the work, the earl went for a stroll around his newly reconfigured grounds, but failed to recall where the old village well had been, fell into it, and drowned.*

Vanbrugh didn’t necessarily invent any of these things. Horace Walpole for one credited Bridgeman with inventing the ha-ha, and it may be, for all we know, that he gave the idea to Vanbrugh. But then it may equally be, for all we know, that Vanbrugh gave it to him. All that can be said is that by about 1710 people suddenly had lots of ideas for how to improve the landscape, principally by giving it an air of greater naturalism. One event that seems to have contributed was a storm of 1711 known as the Great Blow, which knocked down trees all over the country and caused a lot of people to notice, evidently for the first time, how agreeable a backdrop they had made. In any case, people suddenly became unusually devoted to nature.

Joseph Addison, the essayist, became the voice of the movement with a series of articles in The Spectator called “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” in which he suggested that nature provided all the beauty one could want already. It just needed a bit of management, or as he put it in a famous line: “A Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions.” (The newish word landscape, you will gather, hadn’t quite settled in yet.) “I do not know whether I am singular in my Opinion,” he went on, “but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure,” and all at once the world seemed to agree with him.

Stately homeowners everywhere gladly followed these precepts, introducing curving paths and wandering lakes, but for a time the improvements were mostly architectural. All across the country rich landowners packed their grounds with grottoes, temples, prospect towers, artificial ruins, obelisks, castellated follies, menageries, orangeries, pantheons, amphitheaters, exedra (curved walls with niches for busts of heroic figures), the odd nymphaeum, and whatever other architectural caprices came to mind. These were not ornamental trifles, but hefty monuments. The Mausoleum at Castle Howard, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (and where Vanbrugh’s patron the third earl is now passing eternity), was as large and as costly as any of Christopher Wren’s London churches. Robert Adam drew up a plan to erect a complete walled Roman town, picturesquely ruined and entirely artificial, across a dozen acres of meadowy hillside in Herefordshire simply to give a minor noble named Lord Harley something diverting to gaze on from his breakfast table. That was never built, but other diversions of startling magnificence were. The famous pagoda at Kew Gardens, rising to a height of 163 feet, was for a long time the tallest freestanding structure in England. Until the nineteenth century it was richly gilded and covered with painted dragons—eighty in all—and tinkling brass bells, but these were sold off by King George IV to pay down his debts, so what we see today is really a stripped-down shell. At one time the grounds of Kew had nineteen other fantasy structures scattered about, including a Turkish mosque, an Alhambra Palace, a miniature Gothic cathedral, and temples to Aeolus, Arethusa, Bellona, Pan, peace, solitude, and the sun—all so that some members of the royal family would have a selection of diversions with which to punctuate their walks.

For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. An estate owner in Lancashire promised £50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwelling on his estate without cutting his hair or toenails or talking to another person. Someone took up the offer and actually lasted four years before deciding he could take no more; whether he was given at least a partial pension for his efforts is sadly unknown. Queen Caroline—she of the Serpentine in Hyde Park—had the architect William Kent build for her a hermitage at Richmond into which she installed a poet named Stephen Duck, but that was not a success either, for Duck decided he didn’t like the silence or being looked at by strangers, so he quit. Somewhat improbably, he went on to become the rector of a church at Byfleet in Surrey. Unfortunately, he appears not to have been happy there—he appears not to have been happy anywhere—and drowned himself in the Thames.

The ultimate expression of folly building was surely at Chiswick, then a village west of London, where the third Earl of Burlington (and yet another Kit-Cat member) built Chiswick House, which was not a house at all and never intended to be lived in, but a place to look at art and listen to music, a kind of glorified summer house, built on a literally palatial scale. This was the property from which, you may just recall, the eighth Duke of Devonshire stepped out and had his happy first encounter with Joseph Paxton.

Meanwhile, Charles Bridgeman and his successors were extensively reworking whole landscapes. At his masterpiece grounds, Stowe in Buckinghamshire, everything was done on a monumental scale. One of the ha-has stretched for four miles. Hills were reshaped, valleys flooded, temples of marbled magnificence strewn about almost carelessly. Stowe was unlike anything that had ever been built before. For one thing, it was one of the world’s first true tourist attractions. It was the first garden in Britain to attract sightseers and the first to have its own guidebook. It became so popular that in 1717 Lord Cobham, its owner, had to buy a neighboring inn to accommodate visitors.

In 1738, Bridgeman died and soon after was succeeded by a person so youthful that he hadn’t even been born when Bridgeman began work on Stowe. The young man’s name was Lancelot Brown, and he was exactly the man the landscape movement needed.

Brown’s life story closely recalls that of Joseph Paxton. Both were the sons of yeoman farmers, both were exceptionally bright and hardworking, both went into gardening as boys, and both distinguished themselves swiftly in the employ of rich men. In Brown’s case, the story began in Northumberland, in the far north of England, where his father was a tenant farmer on an estate called Kirkharle. Brown was apprenticed as a gardener there at fourteen and served the full seven years, but then left Northumberland and moved south, possibly looking for a better climate for his asthma. What he did for the next period of his life is unknown, but he must have distinguished himself, for soon after the death of Charles Bridgeman Lord Cobham selected him to be the new head gardener at Stowe. He was just twenty-four years old.

Brown found himself in charge of a staff of forty, serving as paymaster as well as head gardener. Gradually, he took on the management of the whole estate, building projects as well as gardening ones. By such means, and no doubt additional study, he acquired the skills to become a competent, if workmanlike, architect. In 1749, Lord Cobham died and Brown decided to become independent. He moved to Hammersmith, then a village west of London, and embarked on a freelance career. At the age of thirty-five he was about to become the man history knows as Capability Brown.

His vision was sweeping. He didn’t make gardens; rather, he made landscapes. It was his habit upon seeing an estate to announce that it had capabilities, and so he acquired his famous nickname. Historians have tended to portray Brown as a mere tinkerer, an incidental improver, who did little more than arrange trees into attractive clumps. In fact, no one shifted more earth or operated on a larger scale than he did. To make the Grecian Valley at Stowe his workmen took away, in barrows, 23,500 cubic yards of soil and rock and scattered it elsewhere. At Heveningham in Suffolk he raised a large lawn by twelve feet. He happily moved fully grown trees and sometimes fully grown villages, too. To aid the former, he devised a wheeled machine that could move trees up to thirty-six feet high without harming them—a piece of horticultural engineering that was seen as almost miraculous. He planted tens of thousands of trees—ninety-one thousand in a single year at Longleat. He built lakes that covered a hundred acres of productive farmland (a fact that almost certainly gave some of his clients pause). At Blenheim Palace, a magnificent bridge crossed a piddling stream; Brown gave it a pair of lakes and made it glorious.

He saw in his mind’s eye exactly how landscapes could look a hundred years hence. Long before anyone else thought of doing so, he used native trees almost exclusively. It is such touches that make his landscapes look as if they evolved naturally when in fact they were designed almost down to the last cow pat. He was far more of an engineer and landscape architect than he was a gardener. He had a particular gift for “confusing the eye”—by, for instance, making two lakes on different levels look like a much larger single lake. Brown created landscapes that were in a sense “more English” than the countryside they replaced, and did it on a scale so sweeping and radical that it takes some effort now to imagine just how novel it was. He called it “place-making.” The landscape of much of lowland England today may look timeless, but it was in large part an eighteenth-century creation, and it was Brown more than anyone who made it. If that is tinkering, it is on a grand scale.

Brown provided a full service—design, provision of plants, planting, maintenance afterward. He worked hard and fast, and so he could manage a lot of commitments. It was said that an hour’s brisk tour of an estate was all it took for him to form a comprehensive scheme for improvements. A big part of the appeal of Brown’s approach was that it was cheap in the long run. Manicured grounds with their parterres and topiary and miles of clipped hedges needed a lot of maintenance. Brown’s landscapes looked after themselves by and large. He was also emphatically practical. Where others built temples, pagodas, and shrines, Brown put up buildings that looked like extravagant follies but actually were dairies or kennels or housing for estate workers. Having grown up on a farm, he actually understood farming and often introduced changes that improved efficiency. If not a great architect, he was certainly a competent one. For one thing, thanks to his work in landscaping, he understood drainage better than perhaps any other architect of his time. He was a master of soil engineering long before such a discipline existed. Unseen beneath his dozing landscapes can be complex drainage systems that turned bogs into meadows, and have kept them that way for 250 years. He might just as well have been called “Drainage Brown.”

Brown was once offered £1,000 to do an estate in Ireland, but he declined, saying that he hadn’t done all of England yet. In his three decades of self-employment, he undertook some 170 commissions and so transformed a good portion of the English countryside. He also grew rich doing so. Within a decade of going independent, he was earning £15,000 a year, enough to put him in the top ranks of the newly emergent middle class.

His achievements were by no means unreservedly admired by all. The poet Richard Owen Cambridge once declared to Brown: “I very earnestly wish I may die before you, Mr. Brown.”

“Why?” asked Brown, surprised.

“Because I should like to see heaven before you had improved it,” Cambridge answered drily.

The artist John Constable hated Brown’s work. “It is not beauty because it is not nature,” he declared. But Brown’s most devoted antagonist was the snobbish Sir William Chambers. He dismissed Brown’s landscapes as unimaginative, insisting they “differ very little from common fields.” But then Chambers’s idea of improving a landscape was to cover it with garish buildings. It was he who designed the pagoda, mock Alhambra, and other diversions at Kew. Chambers thought Brown little more than a peasant because his speech and manners lacked refinement, but Brown’s clients loved him. One, Lord Exeter, hung a portrait of Brown in his house where he could see it every day. Brown also seems to have been just a very nice man. In one of his few surviving letters, he tells his wife how, separated from her by business, he passed the day in imaginary conversation with her, “which has every charm except your dear company, which will ever be the sincere and the principal delight, my dear Biddy, of your affectionate husband.” That’s not bad for someone who was barely schooled. They were certainly not the words of a peasant. He died in 1783 at the age of sixty-six and was much missed by many.

II

Just as Capability Brown was rejecting flowers and ornamental shrubs, others were finding new ones in magnificent abundance. The period that lay fifty years to either side of Brown’s death was one of unprecedented discovery in the botanical world. The hunt for plants became a huge driver of both science and commerce.

The person who can reasonably be said to have started it all was Joseph Banks, the brilliant botanist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyage to the South Seas and beyond from 1768 to 1771. Banks packed Cook’s little ship with specimen plants—thirty thousand in all—including fourteen hundred never previously recorded, at a stroke increasing the world’s stock of known plants by about a quarter. He would almost certainly have found more on Cook’s second voyage, but Banks, alas, was spoiled as well as brilliant. He insisted on taking seventeen servants this time, including two horn players to entertain him in the evenings. Cook politely demurred, and Banks declined to go. Instead he privately financed an expedition to Iceland. En route the party stopped at the Bay o’ Skaill in Orkney, and Banks did some excavating there (though he overlooked the grassy knoll that covered Skara Brae, and so just missed the chance to add one of the great archaeological discoveries of the age to his many other accomplishments).

Meanwhile, dedicated plant hunters were fanning out across the world, not least in North America, which proved to be especially productive of plants that not only were lovely and interesting but would bloom in British soil. The first Europeans to penetrate America’s interior from the east weren’t looking for lands to settle or passages to the west. They were looking for plants they could sell, and they found wondrous new species by the score—the azalea, aster, camellia, catalpa, euphorbia, hydrangea, rhododendron, rudbeckia, Virginia creeper, and wild cherry, as well as many types of ferns, shrubs, trees, and vines. Fortunes could be made from finding new plants and getting them safely back to the nurseries of Europe for propagation. Soon the woods of North America were so full of plant hunters that it is impossible to tell now who exactly discovered what. John Fraser, after whom is named the Fraser fir, discovered either 44 new species of plant or 215, depending on which botanical history you credit.

The dangers of plant hunting were considerable. Joseph Paxton dispatched two men to North America to see what they could find; both drowned when their heavily laden boat overturned on a foaming river in British Columbia. The son of André Michaux, a French hunter, was hideously mangled by a bear. In Hawaii, David Douglas, discoverer of the Douglas fir, fell into an animal trap at a particularly unpropitious moment: it was already occupied by a wild bull, which proceeded to trample him to death. Others got lost and starved, died of malaria, yellow fever, or other diseases, or were killed by suspicious natives. Those who succeeded, however, often acquired considerable wealth—perhaps none more notably (or more aptly named, come to that) than Robert Fortune, last encountered in Chapter VIII traveling riskily around China disguised as a native to discover how tea was produced. His introduction of tea growing to India possibly saved the British Empire, but it was the bringing of chrysanthemums and azaleas to British nurseries that allowed him to die wealthy.

Others were driven by a simple quest for adventure—sometimes dangerously misguided, it would seem. Perhaps the most notable—and on the face of it most unlikely—in this category were the young friends Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, both the sons of English businessmen of modest means. Though neither had ever even been abroad, they decided in 1848 to voyage to Amazonia to search for botanical specimens. Soon afterward, they were joined by Wallace’s brother Herbert and by another keen amateur, Richard Spruce, a schoolmaster on the Castle Howard estate in Yorkshire who had never tackled anything more challenging than an English meadow. None seemed remotely prepared for life in the tropics, and poor Herbert demonstrated as much by catching yellow fever and expiring almost as soon as he was ashore. The others, however, persevered, though for reasons unknown they elected to split up and head off in different directions.

Wallace plunged into the jungles along the Rio Negro and spent the next four years doggedly collecting specimens. The challenges he faced were numberless. Insects made his life a torment. He broke his glasses, on which he was highly dependent, during a lively encounter with a hornets’ nest, and lost a boot in some other moment of mayhem and for some time had to clomp around the jungles half shod. He bewildered his Indian guides by preserving his specimens in jars of caxaca, an alcohol fermented from sugarcane, instead of drinking it as any sensible man would. Thinking him mad, they appropriated the remaining caxaca and melted into the forest. Undeterred—undeterrable—Wallace pressed on.

After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian port city of Pará, he secured passage home on a barque called the Helen. Midway across the Atlantic, however, the Helen caught fire and Wallace had to scramble into a lifeboat, leaving his precious cargo behind. He watched as the ship, consumed by flames, slid beneath the waves, taking his treasures with it. Undaunted (well, perhaps just a little daunted), Wallace allowed himself a spell of convalescence, then sailed to the other ends of the Earth, to the Malay Archipelago, where he roamed ceaselessly for eight years and collected a staggering 127,000 specimens, including 1,000 insects and 200 species of birds never before recorded, all of which he managed to get safely back to England.

Bates, meanwhile, stayed on in South America for seven years after Wallace’s departure, exploring mostly by boat on the Amazon and its tributaries, and eventually brought home almost 15,000 specimens of animals and insects, which seems a modest number compared with Wallace’s 127,000, but some 8,000 of his—more than half, a phenomenal proportion—were new to science.

But the most remarkable of all in many ways was Richard Spruce. He stayed on in South America for a full eighteen years, exploring areas never before visited by a European and assembling vast stores of information, including glossaries of twenty-one native Indian languages. Among much else, he discovered a commercially important rubber plant, the species of coca from which is derived modern cocaine, and the variety of cinchona that produced quinine—for a century the only effective remedy against malaria and other tropical fevers, as well as the flavor in tonic water that is vital for a good gin and tonic.

When at last he returned home to Yorkshire, he discovered that all the money he had earned from his endeavors over twenty years had been misinvested by the people to whom he had entrusted it, and he was now penniless. His health was so ruined that he spent most of the next twenty-seven years in bed, listlessly cataloging his findings. He never did find the strength to write his memoirs.

• • •

Thanks to the efforts of these daring men and scores of others like them, the number of plants available to English gardeners soared amazingly—from about one thousand in 1750 to well over twenty thousand a hundred years later. Newly found exotic plants became hugely prized. A small monkey puzzle tree, a decorative conifer discovered in Chile in 1782, could by the 1840s easily fetch £5 in Britain, roughly the annual cost of keeping a maid. Bedding plants, too, became a huge industry. All of this gave a mighty boost to amateur gardening.

So, too, much more unexpectedly, did the rise of the railways. Railways allowed people to move out to distant suburbs and commute in to work. Suburbs gave homeowners greater space. More spacious properties allowed—indeed, all but required—the new breed of suburbanites to take an interest in gardening.

But one other change was even more profoundly consequential than all others: the rise of female gardening at home. The catalyst was a woman named Jane Webb who had no background in gardening and whose improbable fame was as the author of a potboiler in three volumes called The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-second Century, which she published anonymously in 1827, when she was just twenty years old. Her description of a steam lawn mower so excited (seriously) the gardening writer John Claudius Loudon that he sought her out for friendship, thinking she was a man. Loudon was even more excited when he discovered she was a woman and rather swiftly proposed marriage even though he was at that point exactly twice her age.

Jane accepted, and so began a touching and productive partnership. John Claudius Loudon was already a man of great stature in the world of horticulture. Born on a farm in Scotland in 1783, the year Capability Brown died, he had passed his youth in a fever of self-improvement, teaching himself six languages, including Greek and Hebrew, and absorbing from books as much as was to be known about botany, horticulture, natural history, and all else related to the verdant arts. In 1804, at the age of twenty-one, he began to produce a seemingly endless stream of stout books with earnest, daunting titles—A Short Treatise on Several Improvements Recently Made in Hothouses, Observations on the Formation and Management of Useful and Ornamental Plantations, The Different Modes of Cultivating the Pine-Apple—all of which sold considerably better than they sound as if they ought to have. He also edited, largely wrote, and in effect single-handedly produced a string of popular gardening magazines—as many as five at once—and all this, it may be noted, despite being almost staggeringly unlucky with his health. He had a particular knack, it seems, for getting ill and then developing appalling complications. His right arm, for instance, had to be amputated because of complications arising from a bad bout of rheumatic fever. Soon afterward, his knee ankylosed, leaving him with a permanent limp. As a consequence of his chronic pains, he became for a time addicted to laudanum. This was not a man for whom life was ever easy.

Mrs. Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions—working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts. The book appeared to assume that the reader had scarcely ever been outdoors, much less laid hands on a gardening tool. Here, for instance, is Mrs. Loudon explaining what a spade does:

The operation of digging, as performed by a gardener, consists of thrusting the iron part of the spade, which acts as a wedge, perpendicularly into the ground by the application of the foot, and then using the long handle as a lever, to raise up the loosened earth and turn it over.

The whole book is like that, describing in almost painful detail the most mundane and obvious actions. It is practically unreadable now and it probably wasn’t greatly read then. The value of Gardening for Ladies wasn’t what it contained so much as what it represented: permission to go outside and do something. It came at exactly the right moment to catch the nation’s fancy. In 1841, middle-class women everywhere were bored out of their skulls by the rigidities of life and grateful for any suggestion of diversion. Gardening for Ladies remained lucratively in print for the rest of the century. And it really did encourage them to get their hands dirty. The whole of the second chapter was devoted to manure.

Apart from its appeal as a recreation, there was a second, rather more unexpected impetus behind the rise of the garden movement in the nineteenth century, and one in which John Claudius Loudon also played a central role. The age was vividly marked by epidemics of cholera and other contagions, which killed vast numbers. This didn’t make people want to garden exactly, but it did lead to a general longing for fresh air and open spaces, particularly as it became inescapably evident that urban graveyards were on the whole squalid, overcrowded, and unhealthy.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, London had just 218 acres of burial grounds. People were packed into them in densities almost beyond imagining. When the poet William Blake died in 1827, he was buried, at Bunhill Fields, on top of three others; later, four more were placed on top of him. By such means London’s burial places absorbed staggering heaps of dead flesh. St. Marylebone Parish Church packed an estimated one hundred thousand bodies into a burial ground of just over an acre. Where the National Gallery now stands on Trafalgar Square was the modest burial ground of St. Martin-in-the-Fields church. It held seventy thousand bodies in an area about the size of a modern bowling green, and uncounted thousands more were interred in the crypts inside.

In 1859, when St. Martin’s announced its intention to clear out the crypts, the naturalist Frank Buckland decided to find the coffin of the great surgeon and anatomist John Hunter so that his remains could be reinterred at Westminster Abbey, and Buckland left a riveting account of what he found inside: “Mr Burstall having unlocked the ponderous oak door of the vault No. 3, we threw the light of our bull’s eye lantern into the vault, and then I beheld a sight I shall never forget.” In the shadowy gloom before him were thousands upon thousands of jumbled and broken coffins, crammed everywhere, as if deposited by a tsunami. It took Buckland sixteen days of dedicated searching to find his quarry.

Unfortunately, no one took similar pains with any of the other coffins, which were roughly carted off to unmarked graves in other cemeteries. In consequence the whereabouts of the mortal remains of quite a number of worthies—the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, the royal mistress Nell Gwyn, the scientist Robert Boyle, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, the highwayman Jack Sheppard, and the original Winston Churchill, father of the first Duke of Marlborough, to name just some—are today quite unknown.

Many churches made most of their money from burials, and were loath to give up such lucrative business. At the Enon Baptist Chapel on Clement’s Lane in Holborn (now the site of the campus of the London School of Economics), the church authorities managed to cram a colossal twelve thousand bodies in the cellar in just nineteen years. Not surprisingly, such a volume of rotting flesh created odors that could not well be contained. It was a rare service in which several worshippers didn’t faint. Eventually, most stopped coming altogether, but still the chapel kept accepting bodies for interment. The parson needed the income.

Burial grounds grew so full that it was almost impossible to turn a spade of soil without bringing up some decaying limb or other organic relic. Bodies were buried in such shallow and cursory graves that often they were exposed by scavenging animals or rose spontaneously to the surface, the way rocks do in flowerbeds, and had to be redeposited. Mourners in cities almost never attended at graveside to witness a burial itself. The experience was simply too upsetting, and widely held to be dangerous in addition. Anecdotal reports abounded of graveyard visitors struck down by putrid emanations. A Dr. Walker testified to a parliamentary inquiry that graveyard workers, before disturbing a coffin, would drill a hole in the side, insert a tube, and burn off the escaping gases—a process that could take twenty minutes, he reported. He knew of one man who failed to observe the usual precautions and was felled instantly—“as if struck with a cannon-ball”—by the gases from a fresh grave. “To inhale this gas, undiluted with atmospheric air, is instant death,” confirmed the committee in its written report, “and even when much diluted it is productive of disease which commonly ends in death.” Till late in the century, the medical journal The Lancet ran occasional reports of people overcome by bad air while visiting graveyards.

The sensible solution to all this horrid foulness, it seemed to many, was to move cemeteries out of the cities altogether and make them more like parks. Joseph Paxton was an enthusiast for the idea, but the person principally behind the movement was the tireless and ubiquitous John Claudius Loudon. In 1843, Loudon wrote and published On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards—an unexpectedly timely book, as it happened, since he would need a cemetery himself before the year was out. One of the problems with London cemeteries, Loudon pointed out, was that they were mostly built on heavy clay soils, which didn’t drain well and thus promoted festering and stagnation. Suburban cemeteries, he suggested, could be sited on sandy or gravel soils where the bodies planted within them would become, in effect, wholesome compost. Liberal plantings of trees and shrubs would not only create a bucolic air but also soak up any miasmas that leaked out of the graves and replace foul airs with fresh ones. Loudon designed three of these new model cemeteries and made them practically indistinguishable from parks. Unfortunately, he was not able to rest eternally in one of his own creations, as he died, worn out by overwork, before they could be built. However, he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, in West London, which was founded on similar principles.

Cemeteries became, improbably, de facto parks. On Sunday afternoons, people went to them not just to pay their respects to the dear departed but also to stroll, take the air, and have picnics. Highgate Cemetery in North London, with its long views and imposing monuments, became a tourist attraction in its own right. People living nearby purchased gate keys so that they could let themselves in and out whenever it suited them. The largest of all was Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, opened by the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company in 1854, which grew to hold almost a quarter of a million bodies on its two thousand bucolic acres. It became such a large operation that the company ran a private railway between London and Brookwood, twenty-three miles to the west, with three classes of service and two stations at Brookwood: one for Anglicans and one for nonconformists. Railway workers knew it affectionately as the “Stiffs Express.” The service lasted until 1941, when it was dealt what proved to be a mortal blow by German bombers.

• • •

Gradually it dawned on the authorities that what was wanted really wasn’t cemeteries that were like parks, but parks that were like parks. In the year that Loudon died, an entirely new phenomenon—the municipal park—opened at Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. Built on 125 acres of wasteland, it was an instant success and a much-acclaimed marvel, and it almost goes without saying that it was designed by the ever industrious, ever inventive, ever reliable Joseph Paxton.

Parks already existed at this time, but they were not like parks as we know them today. For one thing, they tended to be exclusive. Only people of fashion and rank (plus a smattering of impudently bold courtesans from time to time) were allowed into the big London parks until well into the nineteenth century. There was a “tacit understanding,” as it is always termed, that parks were not for people of the lower or even middle classes, however those rankings were defined. Some parks didn’t even bother to make it tacit. Regent’s Park charged an admission fee until 1835 expressly to discourage common people from cluttering the paths and lowering the tone. Many of the new industrial cities had almost no parks anyway, so large numbers of working people had nowhere to go for fresh air and recreation other than along the dusty roads that led out of town into the country, and anyone foolhardy enough to step off these rutted tracks and onto private land—to admire a view, empty a straining bladder, take a drink from a stream—could well find his foot painfully clamped in a steel trap. This was an age in which people were routinely transported to Australia for poaching, and any form of trespass, however innocent or slight, was bound to be regarded as nefarious.

So the idea of a park built by a city for the free use of all its citizenry, whatever their station in life, was almost indescribably exciting. Paxton eschewed the formal avenues and ordered vistas that parks normally embraced and created instead something more natural and inviting. Birkenhead Park brought to mind the grounds of a private estate, but for the use of all people. The conception was widely celebrated, but its influence extended far beyond English shores. In the spring of 1851 (that year!), a young American journalist and author named Frederick Law Olmsted, while on a walking holiday in the north of England with two friends, stopped to buy provisions for lunch at a Birkenhead bakery and the baker spoke of the park with such enthusiasm and pride that they decided to go and have a look. Olmsted was enchanted. The quality of landscape design “had here reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed of,” he recalled in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, his popular account of the trip. At that time, many people in New York were actively pressing for a decent public park for the city, and this, thought Olmsted, was the very park they needed. He could have no idea that six years later he would design that park himself.

Frederick Law Olmsted was born in 1822 in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of a prosperous dry goods merchant, and passed his early adulthood flitting from job to job. He worked for a textile firm, went to sea as a merchant seaman, ran a small farm, and finally turned to writing. After his return to America from England, he joined the fledgling New York Times, and went off to tour the southern states, producing a series of celebrated newspaper articles, which were later published as a successful book, The Cotton Kingdom. He became something of a gadfly, socializing with the likes of Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Makepeace Thackeray when they were in town, and joined the publishing firm of Dix & Edwards, where he became a partner. For a time everything seemed to be going his way, but then the firm suffered a series of financial setbacks, and in 1857—a year of economic depression and widespread bank failures—he found himself abruptly broke and unemployed.

At just this moment, the city of New York was about to begin converting 840 acres of hayfields and scrubland into the long-awaited Central Park. It was an enormous site, stretching nearly 2.5 miles from top to bottom and half a mile across. Olmsted, in some desperation, applied for the job of superintendent of the workforce and got it. He was 35 years old, and this was not a step up for him. Becoming the superintendent of a municipal park was, for someone who had enjoyed as much success as he had, a humbling comedown, particularly as Central Park was a far from assured success. For one thing, in those days it wasn’t actually central at all. “Uptown” Manhattan was still nearly two miles to the south. The area of the proposed park was an uninhabited wasteland—a forlorn expanse of abandoned quarries and “pestiferous swamps,” in the words of one observer. The idea of it becoming a popular beauty spot seemed almost ludicrously ambitious.

No design had been agreed for the park—which was, not incidentally, always called the Central Park, with a definite article, in its early days. A prize of $2,000 awaited the winning entry, and Olmsted needed the money. He teamed up with a young British architect, only recently arrived in America, named Calvert Vaux and submitted a plan. Vaux (pronounced “vawks”) was a slight figure, just four feet ten inches tall. He had grown up in London, the son of a doctor, but emigrated to America in 1850 soon after qualifying. Olmsted had passion and vision, but he lacked drafting skills, which Vaux could supply. It was the start of an immensely successful partnership. To satisfy the design brief, all the proposals were required to incorporate certain features—parade ground, playing fields, skating pond, at least one flower garden, and a lookout tower, among rather a lot else—and they also had to incorporate four crossing streets at intervals so that the park wouldn’t act as a barrier to east-west traffic along its entire length. What set Olmsted and Vaux’s design apart more than anything else was their decision to place the cross streets in trenches, below the line of sight, physically segregating them from park visitors, who passed safely above on bridges. “This also had the advantage of allowing the park to be closed at night without interrupting traffic,” writes Witold Rybczynski in his biography of Olmsted. Theirs was the only proposal with this feature.*

It is easy to suppose that park making consists essentially of just planting trees, laying paths, setting out benches, and digging the odd pond. In fact, Central Park was an enormous engineering project. Over twenty thousand barrels of dynamite were needed to reconfigure the terrain to Olmsted and Vaux’s specifications, and over half a million cubic yards of fresh topsoil had to be brought in to make the earth rich enough for planting. At the peak of construction in 1859, Central Park had a workforce of thirty-six hundred men. The park opened bit by bit, so it never had a grand opening. Many people found it disordered and confusing. And it is true, Central Park has little in the way of dominant focal points. As Adam Gopnik has put it: “The Mall is oriented toward nothing much and goes nowhere in particular. The lakes and ponds are all nestled in their own places, and are not part of a continuous waterway. The main areas are not neatly marked off but dribble away into one another. There is a deliberate absence of orientation, of clear planning, of a familiar, reassuring lucidity. Central Park is without a central place.”

But people grew to love it anyway, and soon Olmsted was receiving commissions from all over America. This is slightly surprising because Olmsted was not much good at building the kind of parks that people actually wanted—and the more parks he built, the more evident this became. Olmsted was convinced that all the ills of urban life were owing to bad air and a lack of exercise, producing “a premature failure of the vigor of the brain.” Quiet walks and tranquil reflection were what was needed to restore health, energy, and even moral tone to a jaded citizenry. So Olmsted was absolutely against anything that was noisy, vigorous, or fun. He especially didn’t want diversions like zoos and boating lakes—the very sorts of amusements park users craved. At Franklin Park in Boston he had baseball playing banned, along with all other “active recreations,” as he disdainfully called them, for anyone except children under sixteen. Fourth of July celebrations were flatly forbidden.

People responded by ignoring the rules, and park authorities obliged them by turning a blind eye, so that everywhere Olmsted’s parks ended up as much more pleasurable places than he wanted them to be, though still considerably more restrictive than the parks of Europe with their lively beer gardens and bright-lit rides.

Although he didn’t start landscaping until he was well on the way to middle age, Olmsted’s career was breathtakingly productive. He built over a hundred municipal parks across North America—in Detroit, Albany, Buffalo, Chicago, Newark, Hartford, and Montreal. Though Central Park is his most famous creation, many think Prospect Park in Brooklyn his masterpiece. He also executed more than two hundred private commissions for estates and institutions of every kind, including some fifty university campuses. Biltmore was Olmsted’s last project—and in fact one of his last rational acts. Very soon afterward he slid into a helpless and progressive dementia. He spent the last five years of his life at the McLean Asylum in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, it almost goes without saying, he had designed the grounds.

III

Though there are obvious dangers in speculating too freely about the style of life adopted by the good Reverend Mr. Marsham in his rectory, something he will very probably have dreamed about, if not actually owned, was a greenhouse, for greenhouses were the great new toy of the age. Inspired by Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London, and neatly coinciding with the timely abolition of duties on glass, greenhouses soon were popping up all over and being filled with all the exciting new specimens of plant that were pouring into Britain from around the globe. This widespread transfer of living things between continents was not without consequences, however. In the summer of 1863, a keen gardener in Hammersmith, in West London, found a prize vine in his greenhouse sickening. He was unable to identify the malady, but he saw that the leaves were covered with galls from which sprang insects of a kind he had not seen before. He collected a few and sent them to John Obadiah Westwood, professor of zoology at Oxford and an international authority on insects.

The identity of the vine owner is now lost, which is unfortunate as he was a significant human being: the first in Europe to suffer from an infestation of grape phylloxera, a tiny aphid, that would shortly devastate the European wine industry. About Professor Westwood we know a great deal, however. He had been born in modest circumstances—his father was a diemaker in Sheffield—and was entirely self-taught. He became the leading authority in Britain not only on insects—and really no one could come near him for entomological expertise—but also on Anglo-Saxon writings. In 1849, he was appointed the first professor of zoology at Oxford.

Almost exactly three years after the grape phylloxera’s discovery in Hammersmith, wine growers in the Bouches-du-Rhône region near Arles in southern France found that their vines were withering and dying. Soon vineyard death was spreading across France. Vineyard owners were impotent. Because the insects infested the roots, the first sign of mortal illness was the first sign of anything. Farmers couldn’t dig up the roots to see if aphids were present without killing the vines, so they just had to wait and hope. Mostly they were disappointed.

Forty percent of France’s vines were killed in fifteen years. Eighty percent were “reconstituted” through the grafting on of American roots. Among the general devastation were small, mysterious areas of apparent immunity. All the Champagne region was wiped out but for two tiny vineyards outside Reims, which for some reason successfully resisted infection and still produce champagne grapes from their original roots—the only French champagnes that do.

Phylloxera aphids from the New World had almost certainly reached Europe before, but would have arrived as little corpses, unable to survive the long sea voyage. The introduction of fast steamships at sea and even faster trains on land meant that the little pests could arrive refreshed and ready to conquer new territory.

The grape phylloxera originated in America and had killed off all attempts to introduce European vines onto American soils—a matter that had caused consternation and despair from French New Orleans to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and on through Ohio and the rolling uplands of New York. American vines were immune to phylloxera but didn’t make very good wine. Then someone realized that if you grafted European vines onto American roots, you got vines that could successfully resist phylloxera. The question was whether they produced wine as good as they had before.

In France, many vineyard owners couldn’t bear the thought of corrupting their vines with American stock. Burgundy, fearful that its beloved and exceedingly valuable grand cru wines would be irreparably compromised, refused for fourteen years to allow American roots to besmirch its ancient vines, even though those vines were puckering and dying on every hillside. Many growers almost certainly engaged in a bit of illicit grafting anyway, which may have saved their noble wines from extinction.

But it is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist. It is impossible to say whether wines are worse now than they were before. Most authorities think not, but such a desperate remedy is bound to nurture lingering doubts among those who are inclined to have them. What is certainly true is that surviving pre-phylloxera wines have attracted a cachet that has led people to part with a good deal of their money and much of their common sense in a quest to possess something so deliciously irreplaceable. In 1985, Malcolm Forbes, the American publisher, paid $156,450 for a bottle of Château Lafite 1787. This made it much too valuable to drink, so he put it on display in a special glass case. Unfortunately, the spotlights that artfully lit the precious bottle caused the ancient cork to shrink and it fell with a $156,450 splash into the bottle. Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Château Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world’s most expensive bottle of wine into the world’s most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway.

IV

While the Industrial Revolution was producing wondrous machines that transformed how people (and sometimes pests) lived, horticultural science lagged appallingly. Well into the nineteenth century, no one had any real idea even of something as basic as what made plants grow. Everyone knew that soil needed fertilizing, but there was little agreement on why it did or what constituted an effective fertilizer. A survey of farmers in the 1830s showed that the fertilizers in use at that time included sawdust, feathers, sea sand, hay, dead fish, oyster shells, wool rags, ashes, horn shavings, coal tar, chalk, gypsum, and cotton seeds. Some of these worked better than you might expect—farmers were no fools, after all—but no one could rank them in order of effectiveness or say in what proportions they worked best. In consequence, the overall trajectory of farm yields was relentlessly downward. Corn harvests in upstate New York went from thirty bushels an acre in 1775 to barely a quarter of that half a century later. (A bushel is 35.2 liters, or 32 U.S. quarts.) A few eminent scientists, notably Nicholas Theodore de Saussure in Switzerland, Justus von Liebig in Germany, and Humphry Davy in England, established a relationship between nitrogen and minerals on the one hand and soil fertility on the other, but how you got the former into the latter was still a matter of debate, so farmers almost everywhere continued to cast desperate and often ineffective dressings onto their fields.

Then, in the 1830s, there suddenly came the miracle product the world had been waiting for: guano. Guano—bird droppings—had been used in Peru since the time of the Incas, and its efficacy had been remarked on by explorers and travelers ever since, but it wasn’t until now that anyone thought to scoop it into bags and sell it to desperate farmers in the northern hemisphere. Once outsiders discovered guano, however, they couldn’t get enough of it. A dressing of guano reenergized fields and increased crop yields by up to 300 percent. The world was seized with what came to be known as “guano mania.” Guano worked because it was packed with nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium nitrate—which coincidentally were also vital ingredients in gunpowder. The uric acid in guano was also much valued by dyemakers. So guano became prized from lots of different directions. Suddenly there was almost nothing in the world people wanted more.

Guano was often enormously abundant where seabirds nested. Many rocky islands were literally smothered in it: deposits 150 feet deep were not unknown. Some Pacific islands were essentially nothing but guano. Trading in guano made a lot of people very rich. Schroder’s, the British merchant bank, was founded largely on the guano trade. For thirty years Peru earned practically all its foreign exchange from bagging up and selling bird droppings to a grateful world. Chile and Bolivia went to war over guano claims. The U.S. Congress brought in the Guano Islands Act, which allowed private interests to claim as U.S. territory any guano-bearing islands they found that weren’t already claimed. More than fifty were.

While guano was making life better for farmers, it had one very serious effect on city life: it killed the market in human waste. Previously, the workers who emptied city cesspits had sold the waste to farmers just outside the cities. That had helped keep costs down. But after 1847 the market for human waste collapsed, so disposal became a problem that was generally solved by tipping the collected waste into the nearest convenient river, with consequences that, as we shall see, would take decades to sort out.

The inevitable problem with guano was that it had taken centuries to accumulate but no time at all to be used up. One island off the coast of Africa containing an estimated two hundred thousand tons of guano was scraped bare in just over a year. Prices soared to almost $80 a ton. By 1850, the average farmer had the dispiriting choice of spending roughly half his income on guano or watching his yields wither. Clearly what was needed was a synthetic fertilizer—something that would feed crops reliably and economically. It was just at this point that a curious figure named John Bennet Lawes steps into the story.

Lawes, the son of a wealthy landowner in Hertfordshire, had from boyhood a passion for chemical experimentation. He turned a spare room in the family home into a laboratory and spent most of his time locked away there. In about 1840, in his midtwenties, he became curious about a puzzling quirk of bonemeal fertilizers—namely that bonemeal spread on certain soils like chalks and peats raised turnip yields wondrously, but the same meal on a clay soil had no effect at all. No one knew why. Lawes began to conduct experiments on the family farm, using various combinations of soils, plants, and manures to try to get to the bottom of the problem. It was essentially the start of scientific farming. In 1843, the year that John Claudius Loudon died, Lowes turned part of the farm into the Rothamstead Experimental Station—the world’s first agricultural research station.

Lawes was gloriously obsessed with fertilizers and manures. Nobody has ever taken a deeper—a more literally hands on—interest in manure than Lawes did. There wasn’t an aspect of their powers that didn’t excite his fascination. He fed his animals different diets, then studied their dung to see how they affected yields. He doused plants in every combination of chemicals he could think of, and in so doing discovered that mineral phosphates treated with acid made bonemeal effective in all soils, though he didn’t know why. (The answer came much later from elsewhere and was explained by the fact that the active fertilizing agent in animal bones, calcium phosphate, was inert in alkaline soils, and needed acid to be activated.) Nonetheless, Lawes had created the first chemical fertilizer, which he called superphosphate of lime. The world had the fertilizer it desperately needed. Such was his devotion to his business that on his honeymoon he took his bride on an extended tour of the industrial reaches of the Thames and its tributaries looking for a site for a new factory. He died in 1900 very rich.

All of these developments—the rise of amateur gardening, the growth of suburbs, the development of potent fertilizers—led to one final momentous development that transformed the way the world looks, but is hardly ever noted: the rise of the household lawn.

Before the nineteenth century lawns in any meaningful sense were the preserve almost exclusively of owners of stately homes and institutions with large grounds because of the cost of maintaining them. For those who wished to have a greensward, there were only two options. The first was to keep a flock of sheep. That was the option chosen for Central Park in New York, which until the end of the nineteenth century was home to a roaming flock of two hundred sheep superintended by a shepherd who lived in the building that was until recently the Tavern on the Green. The other option was to employ a dedicated team of people who would spend the whole of every growing season scything, gathering, and carting away grass. Both options were expensive, and neither gave a very good finish. Even the most carefully scythed lawn was, by modern standards, rough and clumpy, and a sheep-grazed lawn was even worse. Which of these options Mr. Marsham went for is impossible to say, but as he employed a gardener, James Baker, it is likely that the lawn was scythed. In any case, it almost certainly looked pretty terrible.

There is a very slight possibility that Mr. Marsham made use of an exciting and slightly unnerving new contraption: the lawn mower. The lawn mower was the invention of one Edwin Beard Budding, a foreman in a cloth factory in Stroud, Gloucestershire, who in 1830, while staring at a machine used to trim cloth, hit on the idea of turning the cutting mechanism on its side, putting it into a smaller contraption with wheels and a handle, and using it to cut grass. Considering that no one had ever thought to mow grass before, this was quite a novel concept. Even more remarkable was that Budding’s machine, as eventually patented, anticipated the look and operation of the modern cylinder mower to a startling degree.

It differed in just two critical respects. First, it was immensely heavy and difficult to maneuver. James Ferrabee & Co., the manufacturer of Budding’s mower, promised in a prospectus that owners of their new machine—not, interestingly, gardeners or estate workers, but the owners themselves—would find that it provided “an amusing, useful and healthy exercise,” and included illustrations showing happy purchasers walking with the machine as if pushing a baby carriage across a smooth surface. In fact, the Budding machine was exhausting. The operator not only had to engage a heavy clutch, and grip it fiercely, but then had to lean into the machine with all his might to make it move. Manhandling it into a new position at the end of each row was barely possible without assistance.

The other distinctive problem with Budding’s machine was that it didn’t cut very well. Because it was so heavy and poorly balanced, the blades often either spun helplessly above the grass or bit savagely into the turf. Only intermittently did they leave in their wake smoothly cropped grass. The machine was also expensive. In consequence of all this, it failed to sell in any great numbers, and Budding and Ferrabee soon parted ways.

Other manufacturers, however, took Budding’s concept and slowly but doggedly improved it. The main problem was weight. Cast iron is immensely heavy. To overcome this, many of the early mechanical lawn mowers were designed to be pulled by horses. One enterprising manufacturer, the Leyland Steam Power Company, took up the idea first suggested by Jane Loudon in 1827 and built a steam-powered mower, but this proved so unwieldy and massive—it weighed over one and a half tons—that it was only ever barely under control and in constant danger of plowing through fences and hedges.* Finally, the introduction of simple drive chains (borrowed from the other new wonder of the age, the bicycle) and Henry Bessemer’s new lightweight steels made the small push-along mower a practical proposition, and that was just what the small suburban garden needed. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the lawn mower was comfortably established as a part of gardening life. On even the most modest properties, a good, well-cut lawn became the ideal. For one thing, it was a way of announcing to the world that the householder was prosperous enough that he didn’t need to use the space to grow vegetables for his dinner table.

Apart from coming up with the initial idea, Budding himself had nothing more to do with lawn mowers, but he did go on to create another invention that proved of lasting benefit to humanity: the monkey wrench. But it was his lawn mower that forever changed the world beneath our feet.

For many people today, gardening is about lawns and almost nothing else. In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop. Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature—namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown, and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff onto it. In the western United States about 60 percent of all the water that comes out of taps for all purposes is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides—seventy million pounds of them a year—that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.

And on that somewhat dispiriting note, let’s return to the house and the last room we’ll visit before we head upstairs.

* The pictures chart the decline of a wealthy young man, so there is a certain aptness in the fact that they were owned, before his (and his house’s) downfall, by William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey.

* In the following century Nuneham Park gained a second distinction. On a visit there in the summer of 1862, with a party that included Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of his Oxford college, Christ Church, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (writing under the pen name Lewis Carroll) began the stories that became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

* Vaux would also have a successful independent career. Among much else, he co-designed, with another Englishman, Jacob Wrey Mould, the American Museum of Natural History overlooking Central Park.

* Eventually Leyland abandoned steam and mowers, and developed an interest in the new internal combustion engine. It finished life as British Leyland, the car manufacturer.