Quentin Letts takes a witty but thought-provoking look at some great British institutions on BBC Radio Four ‘What’s the point of…..’Recently is The Tate. Next Wednesday, it is the British Lawn. Quentin Letts is The Daily Mail’s Parliamentary Sketch Writer, Media Contributor, Broadcaster and Entertaining Guest Speaker.
Grass Clippings Managing Editor, Mike Seaton, boasting over 32 years of turf and lawn knowledge, met up with Quentin recently to discuss the British lawn and at the same take a hard look at Quentin’s lawns. The programme is scheduled to be aired on Wednesday 7th August at 09:00 and 21:30. Listen online.
‘We British are obsessed with our lawns. It’s estimated there are between 15 and 18 million of them and every year we spend hundreds of millions of pounds and dedicate countless hours on them in pursuit of the perfect striped manicure. The roots of our love affair with lawns go deep in to our nation’s history. The first record of what we would recognise as a lawn was in the 17th century and along with our passion for cricket, bowls, football and lawn tennis we’ve spread the art of lawn-making around the world. But at what cost? With pesticides, fertilisers, all that water and the carbon footprint of hour upon hour of mowing some would argue that lawns are anything but green. And with so many other things to fill our time, is it really worth all that cost and effort to produce mown concrete? What is the point of lawns?’
Quentin Letts also contributes to publications as diverse as the News of the World and Horse & Hound magazine, as well as regularly appearing on television progammes such as This Week, Newsnight, Have I Got News For You and Question Time.
Quentin Letts has spent much of his career writing and editing newspaper diaries, including the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ and four years at the helm of the Daily Telegraph’s Peterborough column. After a stint as the Telegraph’s New York correspondent, in 1991 Letts became the editor of Peterborough.
After another stint in New York, but this time as a correspondent for The Times, in 1997, Quentin Letts returned to the U.K. and was given his first taste of sketch-writing at the Daily Telegraph by the then editor, Max Hastings. After four years as a parliamentary columnist at the Telegraph, in 2001, Letts was lured to the Daily Mail by editor Paul Dacre to revive parliamentary sketches in the paper.
A self-proclaimed middle-class man, Quentin Letts is known for his sharp wit and logical arguments in his columns and sketches.
After starting my garden maintenance and landscaping business in 1984 and running it for 21 years I decided I needed a change of direction (probably a mid life crisis, no seriously! :-0) Together with my family, wife Donna, Son Henry and Daughter Fleur (not forgetting Hector the Black Labrador) I moved to France in search of an old farmhouse to renovate. In the interim period whilst waiting for the contract to go through I started writing a blog. Initially just to keep a diary for family and friends to keep up with our progress if they wished but then it occurred to me that there isn’t a real time watcher of the landscape industry in the UK. I didn’t want to waste my experience and experiences so I decided I could put all of this Juice to good use so I started Landscape Juice.
Source: Landscape Juice – What’s the Point of Lawns? – Philip Volice
