Imagine if cactus, not grass, was the most abundant plant on Earth. It would make rugby a whole lot more interesting. It’s one of the many blessings of this planet, though, that nature has given us the perfect playing surface for all manner of sports, from bowls to cricket to football to golf to horseracing to tennis. All we have to do is keep it level and cut.
Given how freely grass grows on every continent, it’s surprising that no-one thought to cultivate it for recreation until the English in the 1600s, when seeking the ideal playing surface for cricket. You would think the ancient Chinese or Egyptians would have devised some grass-based recreation, but there is no evidence of such.
The hieroglyphics of Luxor show people triumphing in battle, building temples and making offerings to the gods, but there’s no-one perfecting the art of reverse swing or rolling a putt in from 20 cubits. The Terracotta Army consists of 8,000 soldiers but not one of them has a ball tucked under his arm. And while Babylon is renowned for its gardens, there’s no mention of a village green.
The Romans apparently did have lawns, but they were the sole preserve of the very wealthy, probably because keeping them cut required a cordon of slaves armed with scissors. The first lawnmower didn’t come along until 1830, when an engineer by the name of Edward Beard Budding (Beard was his middle name, not a nickname – he didn’t have a beard) adapted a machine for cutting the nap off woven cloth into one for doing similar to cricket pitches. Budding also invented the adjustable wrench, clever chap.
There are over 10,000 species of grass on the planet, including our most abundant foodstuffs, wheat, rice and corn, and our fastest growing building material, bamboo. Cannabis, despite the rumours, is not a grass. And don’t you say it is!
That term, by the way, is about 100 years old and believed to come from grasshopper, the Cockney rhyming slang for a copper. Not that a grass is a copper. A grass informs the cops. But let’s not quibble over old slang. We’ve got a nice weekend coming and it’s time to get the mower out.
And just as I write that it starts to rain.
