How Wimbledon gets its grass so green

Economist

26-06-2025

Britain | Turf wars
And why many British gardens are giving up on lawns
Lie down. A good way to understand Centre Court at Wimbledon is to put your cheek on the grass behind the white line where, next week, the toes of the world's top tennis players will be. The first thing you will notice is that the grass is cold, dew-damp and bristly, like fake grass—not silky, like a lawn.
It is also unnaturally level. Flattened by laser-guided levellers and cut daily to 8mm by robot lawnmowers, it feels less horticultural than architectural, its stripes like an artistic exercise in vanishing-points. The next thing you might notice is an approaching security guard. They do not, says Neil Stubley, Wimbledon's head of courts, like people 'rolling around' on it.
England is the land of the lawn. In English literature, history and life the lawn looms large. England swathed its country houses in lawns; took tea on them; invented and perfected games—like tennis and cricket—to play on them. It filled its land with lawns (there are around 24m gardens in Britain, many mostly grass). And it filled its literature with them. Evelyn Waugh's characters lounge on them; P.G. Wodehouse's cavort on them; Philip Larkin killed a hedgehog on one. The lawn was so sacrosanct that for decades English gardeners less gardened lawns than guarded them. In Oxford and Cambridge, beside each inviting-looking lawn stands an uninviting sign: 'KEEP OFF THE GRASS'.
What caused this fad? Partly it is history: from the 1740s Capability Brown, a landscape designer, ditched French-style geometry for gardens that demanded the adjective 'sweeping'—then his style swept the country. Partly it is serendipity: dull English skies keep such sweeping lawns well-watered. Partly it is biology. Lawn enthusiasts like to ponder which came first, the lawn or the lawnmower? The answer is: the sheep. A lawn, says Maria Vorontsova, a grass expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is simply 'pretty pasture' that has been 'eaten by lawnmowers'.
Snobbery played a part too: keeping grass cut short costs. Once it cost because it was so low-tech: sheep don't come cheap, and scything is slow and heavy work. Later it cost because it was high-tech: the first lawnmower, invented in Britain in 1830, cost £1,000 ($1,360) in today's money. Now, on Wimbledon's centre court, between the 'KEEP OFF THE GRASS' signs, a man crouches with a pair of steel scissors, snipping at stray strands of grass—a horticultural haircut, and, given hourly wages in London, a costly one.
Lawns started to represent hierarchy as well as horticulture. In 'A Room of One's Own' Virginia Woolf's narrator is booted off an Oxbridge lawn: only men, and scholars, were allowed on the grass. It also became an eminently exportable form of Englishness. Die in the English army and, for the past 100 years, wherever you fell, your body was likely to be covered by lawn, since the organisation that buries Britain's war dead aimed for the look of an 'English churchyard' in its cemeteries in Ypres and elsewhere. Life as an Englishman might leave you. Lawns would not.
The lawns at Wimbledon are not merely cut, watered, primped and preened. They are also executed when the tournament ends. Like little grassy gladiators, their lives end with the entertainment. To ensure infections don't take hold and the grass next year is young, the court is covered with plastic, and superheated steam is piped in at 190°C (so hot that it boils the water in the surface of the soil). Every blade dies. Wimbledon's grass is green. Its processes are dark.
Haughty culture
Which is perhaps why lawns are changing. Rewilding has become fashionable. 'No Mow May' is spreading. To understand how much lawns are changing, go to King's College, Cambridge. There, behind one of England's most famous chapels, lies another of its most famous lawns. Today, it is barely a lawn at all; it certainly does nothing so dignified as sweep. It waves in the breeze, it buzzes with bees, it is filled with butterflies. Walk through barefoot and it will tangle your toes and scratch your legs. It will smell, faintly, of marjoram. A lawn is a subservient, almost dead, stretch of grass. Walk through this and, says Steve Coghill, the head gardener at King's, 'the whole of the meadow is alive.'
It began in 2018 when King's decided to turn part of its lawn into meadow. Cambridge being Cambridge, they didn't just stop cutting the grass: they involved soil scientists and botanists and ecologists and horticulturalists, all sorts of -ists, to ensure the right seeds were sown in the right way. They sowed the seeds (with students and mulled wine); then harvested them (with shire horses and, later, more wine).
Then they published a scientific paper about it. The results were astonishing. Bats had increased threefold, invertebrates by 25 times. Each week, at dawn, student lepidopterists record the moths they have trapped overnight. Their names—the Grey dagger, the Nut-tree tussock—are, says Mr Coghill, 'like the poetry of 'The Faerie Queene''. (Cambridge being Cambridge, its gardeners talk like that.)
Where Wimbledon executes plants, King's has resurrected them. 'The soil', says Mr Coghill, 'has memory.' Seeds of plants—clustered bellflowers, lizard orchids—that have lain dormant in Cambridge's soil for centuries have come back to life. In the soil is a memory of another era. At one edge of the meadow is a small steel sign reading: 'KEEP OFF THE GRASS'. Hidden by thistles, it is barely legible.