The Lawn Expert [Paperback]

From almost medieval times the lawn has been an integral part of the well-planned garden. Only the soul-less would deny the pleasure of walking barefoot on a cool green sward on a warm summer day. The lawn is more than a functional space--it is commonly part of the fantasy garden that we at least daydream about if not achieve.

Whatever your hopes and expectations The New Lawn Expert can provide you with a good head start as Dr Hessayon offers his trademark clear explanations and easy-to-follow guidance. If you are starting from scratch then here we have everything from preparing the ground to the care of the established lawn. If you have an area of grass that fails to measure up to the title "lawn", then help is at hand as troubles are identified and remedies provided.

The book has excellent step-by-step diagrams providing information and more importantly solutions to every conceivable problem during every month of the year. You might well be a devoted lawn manager with an enviable green sward but still you may have problems--lawns are like that--which is almost part of the obsession. This book then should provide a pleasurable and potentially restorative read. --T W Falinska

An exciting new cover design for the world's best-selling book on lawns.

Get - and keep - the lawn of your dreams. The lawn is an important part of a well-planned garden, one which is 'on show' at all times. If your patch of grass doesn't measure up then The Lawn Expert is here to help, with advice on:

How to mow, dress and feed your lawn.

Dealing with pests and weeds.

How to repair your lawn.

Renovation of neglected lawns.

Growing lawns from seed.

How to lay turf.

Meadows, wildflower meadows and non-grass lawns.

Reliable, easy-to-follow advice and information from EXPERT books - the world's best-selling gardening series.

The Lawn Expert has been the bible on the subject for over 30 years. Now there is an update to tell the owners the very latest techniques for a perfect lawn.

* New chapters on the wild flower meadow and the semi-wild lawn.

* New chapter on ground cover plants.

* New up-to-date information on weed control and seed mixes.

Dr David Hessayon initiated a major innovation in gardening publications in 1959 with the first of his Gardening Expert guides. These best-selling guides have had an unparalleled influence on gardening over the past 50 years. There are over 51 million copies in print. He was awarded the 1993 Gardening Book of the Year Award from the Garden Writers Guild and received the first-ever Lifetime Achievement 'Oscar' at the National British Book Awards. In 1999 he received a Guinness World Record Award as 'Britain's best-selling living author of the 1990s'. He lives in Essex, and has two daughters and four grandchildren.

We are told that the size of the average garden is about 200 sq. ft., but the difference between one garden and another may be enormous. Tiny courtyard gardens abound in the cities and there are vast estates scattered in rural areas, but they all rather surprisingly have one feature in common. The owner almost always considers it either impractical, unappealing or impossible to cover the whole area with a mixture of flowers, trees, shrubs and/or vegetables with exposed earth between the plants.

This means that there is a universal need for some permanent form of ground cover in which beds, borders, rockery, greenhouse, pond etc. can be set. Generally more than one type of ground cover is used, but in most gardens the main type is the grass lawn.

As defined later the grass lawn is an area covered with closely-knit turf grasses – this grassy surface is regularly mown to keep it smooth and it is capable of standing up to a reasonable amount of foot traffic. Some types of lawn can tolerate the heavy wear of regular treading and children’s games but others cannot – some look like green velvet whereas others are coarse, uneven and spotted with weeds and moss, but they are all grass lawns.

For most of us a garden is just not a garden without a lawn and on the large areas surrounding grand country houses nearly all of the land may be down to grass lawns, but the position is rather different in the average garden. Here we want to see flowers and shrubs from the window and we may also want a place for the greenhouse and vegetables, so it is not surprising that only half of the average plot is down to mown grass. There is another reason for limiting the amount of turf in the garden – grass is not an all-purpose ground cover. For paths, drives and other areas subject to very heavy foot or vehicle traffic we must use hard landscaping rather than turf – this calls for non-living material such as stone slabs, bricks, gravel, concrete etc. For covering the bare spaces between shrubs and trees we obviously cannot use grass, and in this situation ground-covering plants are used.

To summarise, there are three ground-covering materials which are commonly used in the average garden – lawn grasses, hard landscaping such as paving or gravel, and ground-covering plants. The relative amounts used of these three types of ground cover may vary widely from one garden to another. In a tiny garden there may be more hard landscaping than grass lawn, and in the labour-saving garden there will be a large amount of ground-covering planting so as to keep down the weeds between the woody plants and reduce the need for watering in dry weather.

Apart from these three basic ground-cover types there are four others which have a part to play in certain situations. The most important of these alternative ground covers is the meadow – an area of grassland which is cut only occasionally. This is a feature of the large garden where it would be not be practical nor even desirable to have all the grass closely shorn. As described in Chapter 9 the meadow can also have a role in the smaller garden and so can its more sophisticated relative which is arousing much interest today – the wildflower meadow in which wildflower seeds are sown. The remaining two types of ground cover are the synthetic lawn composed of plastic carpeting and the non-grass lawn composed of chamomile, thyme or other creeping plants. Neither of these types is really practical, so this brief introduction to ground-covering materials has ranged from the hardly ever absent to the hardly ever seen.