What your lawn needs now is love and attention

The English gardener Monty Don managed to get gardening into the news cycle last northern spring when he suggested that British men should stop obsessing over their lawns. Controversial!

Closely cut grass has been associated with the English garden since at least the 17th century. While the Baroque parterre gardens of aristocratic France and Germany featured patterns of coloured sand and ornate fountains, the English went in for neatly trimmed fantastic swirls of lawn, all achieved through masterly use of scythe, spade and shears.

A good lawn was just as important in the landscape gardens that followed, neatly offsetting the features of the park and the house. Consequently, the English developed a reputation as the kings of lawn. I visited a garden in Portugal years ago and with map in hand went searching for the “English garden”, only to finally realise I was standing on it – a long slope of lawn.

Settler gardens in Australia were equally lawn-conscious. Colonial Government Houses featured lawn terraces on which to entertain local dignitaries; and the grandees followed suit. By the early decades of the 20th century, most of the country was in on the game, with lawns spreading across the new suburbs.

The game-changer was the relatively light, cheap and easy-to-use petrol-powered Victa, invented by Mervyn Victor Richardson in 1952 in his backyard in Croydon.

Richardson was a born tinkerer and inventor, impressively undaunted by failures.

His monoplane crashed; his cars hit the dust of the Depression; but his lawnmower made him a millionaire.

With the greatest respect to Richardson’s persistent ingenuity, the petrol-fuelled lawnmower’s day is done. We can no longer afford the emissions.