Chuck out the Flymo! I’ve got a lawn you can vacuum
ON QUESTIONS of taste, some things are open to what might politely be called debate (and impolitely be called crashing snobbery). Garden gnomes? Plastic Christmas t r ees? Red trousers? The jury is out. But at least they are a moot point.
Other ideas and innovations are, quite simply, beyond all rational discussion. Alcohol-free wine? Diet Stilton? Into that category, some might say, we should add the artificial lawn.
Britain is, unquestionably, the world capital of the manicured lawn. In no other country does the climate lend itself so munificently to the cultivation of lush, sweet- smelling, foot- scrunching, billiard table- smooth expanses of turf. Think Wimbledon’s tennis courts, think Buckingham Palace garden parties, think noble suburbia.
I am always rather moved when flying home from far-flung parts, to look down as we approach the airport and see mile after mile of blessed plots with their lovingly-mown stripes. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, his garden is his realm. No one does a stripey lawn like Homo Britannicus on a Sunday afternoon.
To tear it up and replace it with a plastic mat is, surely, an act of pure vandalism — like hammering a satellite dish to an oak tree, putting ketchup on a scone ...
So how did it come to this? Why on earth am I looking out on our small West London garden and feeling insufferably smug and proud about our latest acquisition: a lawn as fake as a spray-on tan?
It is now three weeks since the green carpet was rolled out across the grounds at Hardman Towers. And we have not regretted it for one moment. It does look ridiculously green. And the ‘grass’ isn’t the only unusual sight. The other morning, I heard a strange noise outside and looked out to see my wife running the vacuum cleaner over the lawn. ‘Leaves,’ she explained. ‘And the instruction manual said we shouldn’t use a rake . . .’
If this stuff takes off, it could lead to a social as well as a horticultural revolution. There are only two surviving forms of sex discrimination which remain unchallenged in even the most progressive 21st-century households. These are a) Men do the barbecue and b) Men mow the lawn.
If the lawn no longer needs mowing, then how long before modern man is redundant?
THE thing is, turf traitors like me are on the rise. It may be many years before we see a plastic lawn at the Chelsea Flower Show, but more and more people are being won over to the advantages of the fake lawn. And they are considerable, particularly if you live in an urban area with a small garden and have children or pets running around over the same tiny patch of grass. If it’s in the shade, it’s soon a pallid patch of weed and, in due course, mud.
A fake lawn, on the other hand, is a hardy perennial. It doesn’t mean filthy feet charging round the house. If your dog or next door’s cat or that infernal fox will insist on leaving its mark on your lawn, you can spray whatever you want on it without it looking like a war zone. You don’t need a mower, of course. To cap it all, TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh has said it’s OK.
The main cons? If people absentmindedly tread a fag-end underfoot, it’s like stubbing one out on the carpet. Spill a barbecue and the lawn will melt.
In our case, the issue arose when we moved home recently. One of the attractions of the place was the fact that it had a garden large enough to kick a small ball a short distance and to park a trampoline. With three small children (aged six, four and one), such things are crucial.
When we moved in, it was not so much a garden as what estate agents call ‘outside space’. Some pretty roses and a small cherry tree still survived amid a dense mess of brambles and weeds, plus a collapsing shed wherein lived many angry wasps. Eventually, with the help of our friend Tito, and his shears, we cleared it all out and were left with a few flowerbeds and a patch of vacant earth. As far as I could see, we had two choices: grass or paving stones. Not that this would be my decision. In such matters, I enjoy comparable status to that of a district council.
This was one for the Secretary of State for House & Garden. And Mrs Hardman had heard tell of a third option: a plastic lawn. What’s more, she had been to see a few. And she had been hugely impressed by the results.
‘Over my dead body,’ I declared, launching into a Churchillian riff about the greensward of old England. The shame of it! Did we want to spend our whole life in a showhome? As far as I was concerned, fake grass could be summed up in one derogatory word: AstroTurf.
This was the stuff invented for indoor American football stadia in the Sixties, starting with the Houston Astrodome. In Britain, the idea took off in the Eighties when a number of football clubs, starting with Queens Park Rangers and Luton Town, began installing plastic pitches.
Soon, there were complaints that players were getting burns every time they fell over. By the Nineties, the same clubs had dug up their weirdly-luminescent green carpets and gone back to playing on honest sods of the natural stuff.
The idea might have remained popular in hot countries where a lawn can’t grow properly but, in Britain, the only place most of us would encounter fake grass was under bits of meat in a butcher’s window. But the manufacturers did not give up. In recent years, there has been a sea change in the technology.
‘Instead of producing material with a single fibre — “butchers’ turf” and so on — they started blending different fibres. They even include strands to look like little bits of dead grass which make it l ook more real,’ explains Paul Hensey, a director of the Society of Garden Designers. ‘And then, two or three years ago, the aesthetics began to improve.’
‘It’s really taken off,’ says Jonathan Tame, technical officer for the British Association of Landscape Industries. His organisation now has no fewer than 28 artificial lawn businesses on its books and another 150 members who offer it as a service.
There are many more out there. All have names which skirt neatly around the fact that this stuff is not actually grass — Easigrass, Evergreen and so on. And they all offer a fairly broad range of products with suitably aspirational names — like Balmoral, Blenheim, Mayfair, Belgravia etc.
WE ENDED up with armfuls of samples and several quotes. Mrs Hardman’s guiding principle — apart from visual authenticity — was the barefoot test. Walk on it in bare feet and see if it feels like grass or plastic. The decent stuff — with a pile of around 30mm — all seemed to work out at about £25 a square yard, plus the same again to install it.
It’s not gardening. It’s carpeting. It costs many times more than ordinary turf and it’s harder to lay. But, as is so often the case, the district council was overruled by the Secretary of State.
In the end, we plumped for the Dutch-made Regal range from a company called Trulawn, which have done homes and schools all over the South-East. It took four men a day to heave three tons of aggregate through the house and lay it over the garden.
On top of that came a layer of sand, then a permeable membrane, and finally the artificial grass.
Some people choose to add a layer of ‘ shockboard’, a thick recycled underlay to give the thing extra bounce if you’re worried about a child falling out of a tree head first. But that seemed like a fake too far; it would have felt like walking on lino and, apparently, leaves more of a stink when animals do their stuff.
Three weeks in, it’s been a great success and the children love it. Even after a downpour, it dries out in no time — and even if it’s still wet, it doesn’t matter. You just hoof them out of the door and there’s no trail of filth when they return.
So I am having to eat my words. It’s a familiar story. ‘Many men have their noses slightly out of joint when women suggest artificial grass,’ says landscape designer Emma Plunket of London’s Plunket Gardens.
‘It doesn’t just mean the end of mowing, but it also spells the death of the tool- shed. Because if you don’t have a mower, you don’t need the shed to keep it in. And as long as you get some good plants around it, it can look great.’
When the children are older, perhaps we will tear it up and go back to verdant thatch with worms and weeds — and dear old moles (I’d like to see one of those try to break through 30mm of Regal).
But if I thought my mowing days were over, I was mistaken. This weekend, my wife handed me the vacuum cleaner, pointed to the garden and said: ‘Leaves . . .’