The Science behind the Green Grass Courts of Wimbledon

Hailing from South Africa, agapanthus can be evergreen or deciduous; the deciduous varieties are the most hardy in this country. The evergreen varieties grow in the southern Cape in milder areas, so will need frost protection in the UK – or they can be grown in pots and brought inside.

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Header image: Suited up to simulate the conditions of working outside on Mars. Jonathan Clarke (the author, left) with visiting engineer Michael Curtis-Rouse, from UK Space Agency (right). Jonathan Clarke personal collection, Author provided.

The English obsession with grass came into being in the 17th century, when the close cut lawn was a status symbol of the rich. Only they could afford to take land out of production for purely aesthetic purposes, and maintaining a lawn before the invention of the mower was a highly skilled and labour-intensive process. The middle classes started growing lawns from the 1860s onwards, and the Victorian popularity for outdoor sports led to their proliferation. Grass species from the Old World were taken to America during this period, and the lawn took there over in the early 20th century. In 2005, NASA published research suggesting that lawns (including residential and commercial lawns and golf courses) were the single largest irrigated ‘crop’ in America, covering about 128,000 square kilometres. In 2013 there were upwards of 15 millions lawns in Britain, costing us £54 million in fertilisers and £127 million on lawn mowers.

Wimbledon fortnight coincides with the height of the strawberry season here in the UK and the humble strawberry becomes world-famous as tennis spectators tuck into strawberries and cream in front of the cameras. This year it even looks like they’ll be able to leave their raincoats at home!

Move over, Mark Watney, there’s a new space botanist heading for Mars! Ryan and I have just finished watching the new Netflix series Away, which follows (over 10 episodes) the quest of five international astronauts to be the first people to set foot on the red planet.

An ethnobotany superhero by night, my mild-mannered daytime alter ego is a science writer for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), one of the UK’s research councils. It’s not often that those two worlds collide, although during the early summer the campus I work on is dotted with the blooms of hardy orchids.

Stephen M. Cullen, University of Warwick

On Thursday I pottered out into the garden and planted some tea bags. This isn’t because I have some loony idea that they’ll grow into tea plants (you were wondering that, weren’t you?) – it’s all in the name of soil science.

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Kate Greene talks about Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who spent six months living on the Russian space station Mir. Shannon, it turns out, was a bookworm. During her stay, she read 50 books and improvised shelving from old food boxes, complete with straps to stop the books floating off. This was in 1996, a good decade before the invention of the Kindle, and so these were real books. She apparently chose titles with the highest word to mass ratio, since launch weight is a critical factor! Lucid left her library behind for future spacefarers, but it burned up when Mir was de-orbited in 2001.

World Bee Day seems like a good day to have a bee-related edition of The Hive, my round-up of positive (solarpunk) eco news stories. The UN designated 20 May as World Bee Day in 2017, to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face and their contribution to sustainable development.

2017 is the 100th anniversary of the start of the Cottingley fairies story, a hoax which entrances the UK to this day. Cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright faked photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden, intended to be a practical joke on their grown-ups. When Elsie’s mother showed the photos to the local Theosophical Society, she set in motion a chain of events that led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to declare the photographs to be authentic. He wrote an article on fairy life for The Strand magazine in November 1920, and fairy fever gripped the nation. Conan Doyle later wrote a book on the subject, The Coming of the Fairies – The Cottingley Incident.