At Home

by Bill Bryson

  The identity of the vine owner is now lost, which is unfortunate as he was a significant human being: the first in Europe to suffer from an infestation of grape phylloxera, a tiny aphid, that would shortly devastate the European wine industry. About Professor Westwood we know a great deal, however. He had been born in modest circumstances—his father was a diemaker in Sheffield—and was entirely self-taught. He became the leading authority in Britain not only on insects—and really no one could come near him for entomological expertise—but also on Anglo-Saxon writings. In 1849, he was appointed the first professor of zoology at Oxford.

  Almost exactly three years after the grape phylloxera’s discovery in Hammersmith, wine growers in the Bouches-du-Rhône region near Arles in southern France found that their vines were withering and dying. Soon vineyard death was spreading across France. Vineyard owners were impotent. Because the insects infested the roots, the first sign of mortal illness was the first sign of anything. Farmers couldn’t dig up the roots to see if aphids were present without killing the vines, so they just had to wait and hope. Mostly they were disappointed.

  Forty percent of France’s vines were killed in fifteen years. Eighty percent were “reconstituted” through the grafting on of American roots. Among the general devastation were small, mysterious areas of apparent immunity. All the Champagne region was wiped out but for two tiny vineyards outside Reims, which for some reason successfully resisted infection and still produce champagne grapes from their original roots—the only French champagnes that do.

  Phylloxera aphids from the New World had almost certainly reached Europe before, but would have arrived as little corpses, unable to survive the long sea voyage. The introduction of fast steamships at sea and even faster trains on land meant that the little pests could arrive refreshed and ready to conquer new territory.

  The grape phylloxera originated in America and had killed off all attempts to introduce European vines onto American soils—a matter that had caused consternation and despair from French New Orleans to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and on through Ohio and the rolling uplands of New York. American vines were immune to phylloxera but didn’t make very good wine. Then someone realized that if you grafted European vines onto American roots, you got vines that could successfully resist phylloxera. The question was whether they produced wine as good as they had before.

  In France, many vineyard owners couldn’t bear the thought of corrupting their vines with American stock. Burgundy, fearful that its beloved and exceedingly valuable grand cru wines would be irreparably compromised, refused for fourteen years to allow American roots to besmirch its ancient vines, even though those vines were puckering and dying on every hillside. Many growers almost certainly engaged in a bit of illicit grafting anyway, which may have saved their noble wines from extinction.

  But it is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist. It is impossible to say whether wines are worse now than they were before. Most authorities think not, but such a desperate remedy is bound to nurture lingering doubts among those who are inclined to have them. What is certainly true is that surviving pre-phylloxera wines have attracted a cachet that has led people to part with a good deal of their money and much of their common sense in a quest to possess something so deliciously irreplaceable. In 1985, Malcolm Forbes, the American publisher, paid $156,450 for a bottle of Château Lafite 1787. This made it much too valuable to drink, so he put it on display in a special glass case. Unfortunately, the spotlights that artfully lit the precious bottle caused the ancient cork to shrink and it fell with a $156,450 splash into the bottle. Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Château Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world’s most expensive bottle of wine into the world’s most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway.

  IV

  While the Industrial Revolution was producing wondrous machines that transformed how people (and sometimes pests) lived, horticultural science lagged appallingly. Well into the nineteenth century, no one had any real idea even of something as basic as what made plants grow. Everyone knew that soil needed fertilizing, but there was little agreement on why it did or what constituted an effective fertilizer. A survey of farmers in the 1830s showed that the fertilizers in use at that time included sawdust, feathers, sea sand, hay, dead fish, oyster shells, wool rags, ashes, horn shavings, coal tar, chalk, gypsum, and cotton seeds. Some of these worked better than you might expect—farmers were no fools, after all—but no one could rank them in order of effectiveness or say in what proportions they worked best. In consequence, the overall trajectory of farm yields was relentlessly downward. Corn harvests in upstate New York went from thirty bushels an acre in 1775 to barely a quarter of that half a century later. (A bushel is 35.2 liters, or 32 U.S. quarts.) A few eminent scientists, notably Nicholas Theodore de Saussure in Switzerland, Justus von Liebig in Germany, and Humphry Davy in England, established a relationship between nitrogen and minerals on the one hand and soil fertility on the other, but how you got the former into the latter was still a matter of debate, so farmers almost everywhere continued to cast desperate and often ineffective dressings onto their fields.

  Then, in the 1830s, there suddenly came the miracle product the world had been waiting for: guano. Guano—bird droppings—had been used in Peru since the time of the Incas, and its efficacy had been remarked on by explorers and travelers ever since, but it wasn’t until now that anyone thought to scoop it into bags and sell it to desperate farmers in the northern hemisphere. Once outsiders discovered guano, however, they couldn’t get enough of it. A dressing of guano reenergized fields and increased crop yields by up to 300 percent. The world was seized with what came to be known as “guano mania.” Guano worked because it was packed with nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium nitrate—which coincidentally were also vital ingredients in gunpowder. The uric acid in guano was also much valued by dyemakers. So guano became prized from lots of different directions. Suddenly there was almost nothing in the world people wanted more.

  Guano was often enormously abundant where seabirds nested. Many rocky islands were literally smothered in it: deposits 150 feet deep were not unknown. Some Pacific islands were essentially nothing but guano. Trading in guano made a lot of people very rich. Schroder’s, the British merchant bank, was founded largely on the guano trade. For thirty years Peru earned practically all its foreign exchange from bagging up and selling bird droppings to a grateful world. Chile and Bolivia went to war over guano claims. The U.S. Congress brought in the Guano Islands Act, which allowed private interests to claim as U.S. territory any guano-bearing islands they found that weren’t already claimed. More than fifty were.

  While guano was making life better for farmers, it had one very serious effect on city life: it killed the market in human waste. Previously, the workers who emptied city cesspits had sold the waste to farmers just outside the cities. That had helped keep costs down. But after 1847 the market for human waste collapsed, so disposal became a problem that was generally solved by tipping the collected waste into the nearest convenient river, with consequences that, as we shall see, would take decades to sort out.

  The inevitable problem with guano was that it had taken centuries to accumulate but no time at all to be used up. One island off the coast of Africa containing an estimated two hundred thousand tons of guano was scraped bare in just over a year. Prices soared to almost $80 a ton. By 1850, the average farmer had the dispiriting choice of spending roughly half his income on guano or watching his yields wither. Clearly what was needed was a synthetic fertilizer—something that would feed crops reliably and economically. It was just at this point that a curious figure named John Benne
t Lawes steps into the story.

  Lawes, the son of a wealthy landowner in Hertfordshire, had from boyhood a passion for chemical experimentation. He turned a spare room in the family home into a laboratory and spent most of his time locked away there. In about 1840, in his midtwenties, he became curious about a puzzling quirk of bonemeal fertilizers—namely that bonemeal spread on certain soils like chalks and peats raised turnip yields wondrously, but the same meal on a clay soil had no effect at all. No one knew why. Lawes began to conduct experiments on the family farm, using various combinations of soils, plants, and manures to try to get to the bottom of the problem. It was essentially the start of scientific farming. In 1843, the year that John Claudius Loudon died, Lowes turned part of the farm into the Rothamstead Experimental Station—the world’s first agricultural research station.

  Lawes was gloriously obsessed with fertilizers and manures. Nobody has ever taken a deeper—a more literally hands on—interest in manure than Lawes did. There wasn’t an aspect of their powers that didn’t excite his fascination. He fed his animals different diets, then studied their dung to see how they affected yields. He doused plants in every combination of chemicals he could think of, and in so doing discovered that mineral phosphates treated with acid made bonemeal effective in all soils, though he didn’t know why. (The answer came much later from elsewhere and was explained by the fact that the active fertilizing agent in animal bones, calcium phosphate, was inert in alkaline soils, and needed acid to be activated.) Nonetheless, Lawes had created the first chemical fertilizer, which he called superphosphate of lime. The world had the fertilizer it desperately needed. Such was his devotion to his business that on his honeymoon he took his bride on an extended tour of the industrial reaches of the Thames and its tributaries looking for a site for a new factory. He died in 1900 very rich.

  All of these developments—the rise of amateur gardening, the growth of suburbs, the development of potent fertilizers—led to one final momentous development that transformed the way the world looks, but is hardly ever noted: the rise of the household lawn.

  Before the nineteenth century lawns in any meaningful sense were the preserve almost exclusively of owners of stately homes and institutions with large grounds because of the cost of maintaining them. For those who wished to have a greensward, there were only two options. The first was to keep a flock of sheep. That was the option chosen for Central Park in New York, which until the end of the nineteenth century was home to a roaming flock of two hundred sheep superintended by a shepherd who lived in the building that was until recently the Tavern on the Green. The other option was to employ a dedicated team of people who would spend the whole of every growing season scything, gathering, and carting away grass. Both options were expensive, and neither gave a very good finish. Even the most carefully scythed lawn was, by modern standards, rough and clumpy, and a sheep-grazed lawn was even worse. Which of these options Mr. Marsham went for is impossible to say, but as he employed a gardener, James Baker, it is likely that the lawn was scythed. In any case, it almost certainly looked pretty terrible.

  There is a very slight possibility that Mr. Marsham made use of an exciting and slightly unnerving new contraption: the lawn mower. The lawn mower was the invention of one Edwin Beard Budding, a foreman in a cloth factory in Stroud, Gloucestershire, who in 1830, while staring at a machine used to trim cloth, hit on the idea of turning the cutting mechanism on its side, putting it into a smaller contraption with wheels and a handle, and using it to cut grass. Considering that no one had ever thought to mow grass before, this was quite a novel concept. Even more remarkable was that Budding’s machine, as eventually patented, anticipated the look and operation of the modern cylinder mower to a startling degree.

  It differed in just two critical respects. First, it was immensely heavy and difficult to maneuver. James Ferrabee & Co., the manufacturer of Budding’s mower, promised in a prospectus that owners of their new machine—not, interestingly, gardeners or estate workers, but the owners themselves—would find that it provided “an amusing, useful and healthy exercise,” and included illustrations showing happy purchasers walking with the machine as if pushing a baby carriage across a smooth surface. In fact, the Budding machine was exhausting. The operator not only had to engage a heavy clutch, and grip it fiercely, but then had to lean into the machine with all his might to make it move. Manhandling it into a new position at the end of each row was barely possible without assistance.

  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 life as British Leyland, the car manufacture
r.

  • CHAPTER XIII •

  THE PLUM ROOM

  I

  We call it the plum room for no other reason than that the walls were painted that color when we moved in, and by accident the name stuck. There is no telling what the Reverend Mr. Marsham called this room. It appeared on the original plans as “the Drawing Room,” but then that key room was moved next door during the reshuffle that deprived the servants of the proposed “Footman’s Pantry” and gave Mr. Marsham a spacious dining room instead. Whatever it was called, this room was clearly intended as a kind of parlor, probably for the receiving of favored guests. Mr. Marsham might have called it the library, for one section of wall is filled with a built-in bookcase reaching from floor to ceiling and large enough to hold about six hundred books, a respectable number for a man of his profession in that day. By 1851, books for reading were widely affordable, but books for show remained expensive, so if Mr. Marsham’s shelves held a collection of tooled calfskin it is entirely possible that that was display enough to give the room its name.

  Mr. Marsham seems to have lavished a good deal of care on this room. The cornice moldings, wooden fireplace surround, and bookshelves are all in a semiexuberant classical style that bespeaks expense and thoughtful selection. Nineteenth-century pattern books offered homeowners an almost infinite array of shapely, esoterically named motifs—ovolos, ogees, quirks, crockets, scotias, cavettos, dentils, evolute spirals, even a “Lesbian cymatium,” and at least two hundred more—with which to individualize projecting surfaces of wood or plaster, and Mr. Marsham chose liberally, opting for bubble-like beading around the doorcase, fluted columns at the windows, ribbony swags fluttering across the fireplace breast, and a stately show of repeating demi-hemispheres in a style known as egg-and-dart around the ceiling trim.