At Home - Bill Bryson [154]
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