Why everyone’s talking about... Dennis mowers

THE eco-brigade may have stopped cutting their lawns so that they can turn them into wildflower meadows, but when it comes to a professional sporting field, that just won’t cut it. So how do the experts ensure there’s not a blade of grass out of place?

With some serious kit, such as a lawnmower from Dennis, a 126- year- old c o mpany whose c ust o mers have included Wembley, Lord’s, Wimbledon, Old Trafford, the British Crown Green Bowling Association and the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar. But you have to have deep pockets – the cheapest in its range is about £ 6,000. The most expensive? About £14,000.

What do you get for that?

Some robust machinery. A mower needs to travel ten miles to go over the Wembley pitch once with its hardened steel blades, and it will have to work up to 30 hours a week for 50 years. Dennis has become so synonymous with groundskeeping that the bands you see on pitches – caused by grass being bent in different directions – are sometimes dubbed ‘Dennis Stripes’. Its highest-tech models are battery-powered with a screen that lets users set the speed, rotor rate and more. It needs to be accurate: the right pitch can be the difference between success and victory, while football’s European governing body, Uefa, says grass should be between 24mm and 28mm high, cut in straight lines, and with strict limits of surface traction and hardness: too soft and it’s heavy-going for players, too hard and they risk injury.

So how did Dennis start?

In the late 19th Century, when brothers Raymond and John Dennis set up a business making motorised tricycles in Surrey, before moving into cars, lorries and fire engines. In 1922 it launched a lawnmower – with the big innovation that it could turn without marking the grass. The brochure claimed it could do a job that would take two men and a horse seven hours in half the time. By 1925, Windsor Castle was using Dennis Mowers, as were many of the ‘fine houses and estates around the Colonies’, the company boasted. For most of the 20th Century, Dennis was Guildford’s main employer, but it hit financial trouble and after several owners the brand is now part of Derbyshire-based Howardson.

What not to say…

Wouldn’t i t be easier just to use AstroTurf?