All eyes - in the tennis world at least - are focused on a small part of London, England at the moment, with the second week of Wimbledon under way.
The grass courts are something of an institution over there, and that is for a very good reason. The BBC website has a very interesting blog posting dedicated to the small patches of turf which make SW19 such a famous London zip code.
It goes: The English lawn was invented in the early 17th Century as a way for the Jacobean gentry to assert their superiority. Hugely labour intensive, only the wealthiest and most powerful could afford to maintain the immaculate turf.
The traditional use of sheep or other livestock to graze pasture lacked the precision to create the closely-cut finish that amazed the rival gardeners of France and beyond. The perfect lawn was hand-produced by scything and shearing the grass.
With the invention of the mowing machine in 1830, the lawn escaped the bonds of England's great estates and became a key component of the Victorian enthusiasm for games, sports and pastimes.
Croquet, cricket, bowls and lawn tennis required immaculate grass playing surfaces and the art of lawn-making was developed and exported around the world along with imperial expansion.
However, domestic dominance was largely retained because a key component of a soft lawn is soft weather - drizzly English rain.
In the 20th Century the United States, in keeping with its acquired super-power status, mobilised the masses to defy this meteorological handicap and strive for global lawn domination.
The American Garden Club convinced its members that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful lawn: "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green and neatly edged".
In suburban Britain, no garden was complete without its square of striped green, tended to within an inch of its life. The lawn had become a ubiquitous part of the English landscape, as this map of Wimbledon from 1933 shows.
The grass courts are something of an institution over there, and that is for a very good reason. The BBC website has a very interesting blog posting dedicated to the small patches of turf which make SW19 such a famous London zip code.
It goes: The English lawn was invented in the early 17th Century as a way for the Jacobean gentry to assert their superiority. Hugely labour intensive, only the wealthiest and most powerful could afford to maintain the immaculate turf.
The traditional use of sheep or other livestock to graze pasture lacked the precision to create the closely-cut finish that amazed the rival gardeners of France and beyond. The perfect lawn was hand-produced by scything and shearing the grass.
With the invention of the mowing machine in 1830, the lawn escaped the bonds of England's great estates and became a key component of the Victorian enthusiasm for games, sports and pastimes.
Croquet, cricket, bowls and lawn tennis required immaculate grass playing surfaces and the art of lawn-making was developed and exported around the world along with imperial expansion.
However, domestic dominance was largely retained because a key component of a soft lawn is soft weather - drizzly English rain.
In the 20th Century the United States, in keeping with its acquired super-power status, mobilised the masses to defy this meteorological handicap and strive for global lawn domination.
The American Garden Club convinced its members that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful lawn: "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green and neatly edged".
In suburban Britain, no garden was complete without its square of striped green, tended to within an inch of its life. The lawn had become a ubiquitous part of the English landscape, as this map of Wimbledon from 1933 shows.
Just look at the lawns on some of those houses.
