At Home - Bill Bryson [153]
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