Photograph courtesy of the Missouri Botanical Garden Archives
Grass didn’t inspire the lawn mower. It was badminton—and velvet. In 1827, English inventor Edward Budding stood in a textile mill, watching a machine shave the nap off fabric: “Hey…if that were grass—wow, this could work better than servants with scythes!” And so British servants were given reel mowers to push across “the vegetable surfaces of lawns, grass-plats, and pleasure grounds.” Soon after, Americans decided they wanted vegetable surfaces for their pleasure grounds, too. They plowed the prairie under for fescue, unrolling sod for tennis courts and football fields and blithely overlooking the fact that grass doesn’t grow well here. It requires the constant application of gray powders, yellow sprays, and strange, waxy granules—but the ease and majesty of the mower distracted from that. This specimen, the first power mower at the Missouri Botanical Garden (gasoline-powered, water-cooled) would surely distract one from just about anything. The Coldwell Lawn Mower, with its excellent network of flywheels, water chambers, and greasy chains, could blow through an acre of grass in an hour. Imagine this poor man in the middle of a St. Louis August, passed out next to a reel mower, his pipe chewing on the lawn like Popeye would chew through a spinach patch to revive its owner, and you’ll understand his strutting stance, his satisfied countenance.
