Blame it on class. Is yours lawn or grass? Striped or wild? Real or plastic? Wherever you turn, social status still colours our view of the green stuff at the heart of more than 20 million gardens across the UK.
It was ever thus. When ‘Capability’ Brown turned 18th-century ducal estates into bucolic grassland, rolling lawns became the aspiration of their day, made possible only by horse-drawn beasts of burden and a squad of skilled scythers. Even when the invention of the cylinder mower by Edwin Budding in 1830 democratised gardening by bringing the lawn into easy reach of the middle classes, the die was already cast. His revolutionary machine merely fuelled their desire to ape the aristocracy by tweaking, cutting and rolling their grass until it bent to their whim. Well-tended grass remained a status symbol that, two centuries on, fuels a market worth over £2 billion (and growing) in the UK alone.
Grass is part of our national psyche, woven into weekend rituals; it adds value to our homes and is a place for kids to let off steam. A design feature too, it brings calm to busy back gardens, and a boon in extreme weathers, cooling the air around it and absorbing rainwater in storms.