I'm at Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire and this magnificent building behind me
used to be surrounded by formal 17th Century Dutch-style gardens.
Most of the original design has now gone but there are still some enclosed formal areas
that have dead straight paths, clipped hedges, and crucially smooth green lawns.
Now whatever the size and shape of your lawn, Autumn is a really good time to give it some love.
And Piers the Head Gardener is going to show me what the team do here at Dyrham.
So this is a really impressive space. Tell me about this. So this is Stable Court.
So this is the first bit you'd see as you come out of the stable yard.
Now by modern day standards looking at just two lawns doesn't really blow you away,
but in the 17th Century these lawns would have been really significant. People didn't have lawns.
Lawn mowers weren't invented until 1830 so these lawns had to be completely cut and managed by hand.
So that would have meant scythe men cutting it, they would have had to rake up all the arisings.
And then they would have had to scarify and manage the lawn in that way.
So hang on - scythe men. This will be the same people who work out in the fields who cut the hay.
But it would be the most skilled scythe men who can actually get a really neat, close cut.
Which was very skilled labour at the time.
William Blathwayte used to pay the scythe men twice as much money as the gardeners here.
So it really was considered a skill.
So I'm interested to know what you have to do to keep the lawns looking so good.
How often are you mowing? So we're actually mowing weekly here. We're actually in a good spot.
It gets a lot of sunshine so it really does keep growing. We will slow down the regime
as the seasons go on. So October we'll probably go to fortnightly mowing
before we actually stop mowing at all.
I'm just looking at the grass and thinking it's really lush,
and also noticing there's lots of clover in it isn't there. Do you think that has an impact?
Yes, so the clover is a nitrogen fixer so actually it doesn't need to be fed because it's taking the nitrogen
out of the air and putting that into the soil. So that's keeping all our grass nice and green.
So this is a lawn you have to scarify? Yes. So we do scarify this lawn. It gets a little bit more shade
than the other lawns and so we normally do it with machinery.
But obviously at home you can use a garden rake, a tine rake.
So I'll just be going over the lawn and just applying a little bit of pressure.
You can start seeing it's already bringing up moss and dead grass.
And this is what we want to get out. The dead grass obviously is done for, it's finished.
And we want to be taking that out to allow more space and light for the remaining grass to really thrive.
So this is a really good time of year isn't it for light and air and moisture
to be getting into the grass roots and encouraging more growing? That's it exactly.
It's a perfect time of year for that. And don't be too worried if you've got a mossy lawn,
and you take out a bit too much. You can always put more grass seed down and there's still
enough time in the year to actually get that to grow again.
So as well as scarifying did you say that you aerate this lawn?
Yes, so we aerate this lawn as well. Like I said we get a lot of impact on here,
and aerating it we just spike it with a machine that we can just walk behind.
If you've got a small lawn that's probably a little bit too much so what you can do
is just use a garden fork. And really it's as simple as just pushing your fork into the soil,
into the ground as far as you can go. And then we're just going along literally just spiking it,
and then moving back a little bit and continue spiking.
That looks like quite hard work? Yes it can be, depends how tough your ground is.
But hopefully your lawn will be a bit softer than our lawns.
We get several thousand visitors a day walk across our lawn, so hopefully your lawn at home be a bit softer.
And I guess with the lawns as formal as this having really nice crisp edges is important isn't it?
Yes that's really important to the structure of this garden, so we do do a lot of edging by hand.
Show me. So I've got a pair of edging shears. Some people find edging shears feel a bit blunt.
It's not always down to the sharpness of the blades. Sometimes it's down to the tightness of the bolts.
So just be aware that it's not always how sharp your blades are. And then I can just run along quite
comfortably cutting the edge of our lawn. So edging all these lawns must take ages?
Yes it does, and it's too much for our staff to really do ourselves so we will depend on the volunteers
to come and help us do the edging. And they go around in quite a big party and edge all our lawns
all at the same time. Well it looks like your volunteers have got plenty to do to keep them busy.
National Trust gardens are a great source of inspiration
and our gardeners and volunteers are always happy to talk.
So why not come along to one of our places or get a copy of the National Trust School of Gardening from one of our shops.