Question from Rebekah - Lawns and gardens in Tudor times
posted by Lara | 8:18 PM
After looking at many photos of estates in Great Britain where the Tudors lived, I was just wondering about the gardens that are seen now. Did they mow the lawns in the 1600s? It seems a huge job now. I can't imagine how they kept them up without current technology.
2 Comments:
A superb question, and one that historians have only recently begun to examine, oddly enough. The history of gardens in Tudor England has become a very trendy topic only in the past 5 years or so! It is so newly trendy, in fact, that only a handful of books have been published about it. Did people in the Tudor era "mow" their lawns in the modern sense, with wheeled mechanical lawn mowers? No. But they did use animals, usually sheep, to keep whatever grass they had in their gardens short, and they also used scythes and other single-bladed cutting tools to hand-cut the grass where they wanted to do so. But mechanical mowers, even the "old" push type with whirling spiral blades, are modern inventions and were not available in the 16th century.
How did they keep up the gardens? lots and lots of servants.
Aren't servants wonderful? ;)
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