Garden Heroes and Villains E-Book

George Drower

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 256

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

A follow up to "Gardeners, Gurus and Grubs", this collection of stories looks at the heroes and villains of the gardening world. It talks about: how Heron of Alexandria surprised unwelcome visitors to his garden in the ancient times by squirting water over them from his newly invented fountain; the story of the garden gnome; and more.

Leseprobe

Garden Heroes

and Villains

Joke fountains in Italian Renaissance gardens. (Worlidge, The Art of Gardening, 1688)

Garden Heroes

and Villains

GEORGE DROWER

First published in 2006

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © George Drower, 2006, 2013

The right of George Drower to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978-0-7509-5414-3

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Introduction

1. TECHNO WIZARDS

Edwin Budding’s Lawnmower

John Aitken’s Chainsaw

Heron of Alexandria’s Fountains

Percy Thrower, the Media Presenter

Thomas Church’s Timber Decking

Caius Martius’s Ornate Hedging

2. GARDEN SPOILERS

Charles Isham’s Gnomes

Christopher Leyland’s Monster Tree

William Harcourt’s Country House Demolitions

Paul Muller’s DDT Insecticide

John Innes’s Peat Compost

3. INVADERS AND INFILTRATORS

Conrad Loddiges’s Rhododendron

Emilio Levier’s Giant Hogweed

Thomas Brocklehurst’s Squirrels

Philipp von Siebold’s Japanese Knotweed

Christine Buisman and Dutch Elm Disease

4. OF GREATEST ADVANTAGE

John Rose’s English Vines

Carolus Clusius’s Flower Garden

John Loudon’s Horticultural Journal

Martin Hope Sutton’s Packet Seeds

Harry Veitch’s Chelsea Flower Show

Elsie Wagg’s National Gardens Scheme

Further Reading

A steam saw. (Grimshaw, Saws, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1880)

Introduction

Most gardeners have needed to become familiar with those mischievous and worryingly widespread plants such as Japanese knotweed, giant hogweed, and common rhododendron. But what of the villains who, perhaps unwittingly, introduced them? Who were they and what caused them to bring them here? Then there are those really useful practical garden features such as timber decking, lawn rollers and greenhouses: who was it who devised them?

In surprisingly many respects it has been characters beyond the immediate world of horticulture – whether environmentalists, founders of institutions, engineers, scientists, financiers or entrepreneurs – who have influenced the content and shape of gardens. Some contraptions and ideas have been especially relevant to certain forms of garden: containers and ingenious window-sill devices for city roof terraces; timber decking and peat compost grown for town gardens; lawnmowers and gnomes in the suburbs; and cattle grids and ha-has for country estates. So who were these unsung heroes and demonic villains? How did their ideas come about?

Among the heroes who devised ingenious tools, particularly significant was Edwin Budding, a Gloucestershire mechanic who innovatively rotated a bench-mounted cloth-trimming machine by 90 degrees to create the world’s first lawnmower. Hitherto lawns had to be cut by teams of mowers using scythes, which meant they were the preserve of the wealthy. Budding’s brilliantly simple machine changed all by enabling millions of middle-class gardeners to quickly mow their own lawns – although many who dislike cutting lawns might claim he was the villain who created the summer weekend drudgery of having to keep such green spaces neat. Another machine that seemed to evolve from an earlier function was the chainsaw. Originally invented in 1785 by John Aitken, a Scottish surgeon, to cut through bones during operations, it was not developed for the purpose of cutting trees until 1929, when it was put to use in forestry work by a German industrialist called Andreas Stihl, and has since become infamous – especially abroad – as a device by which woodlands have been destroyed.

Then there were good-natured enablers, like the socialite Elsie Wagg, whose simple adjustment of an existing idea radically transformed gardens and gardening. In 1926 her suggestion to the owners of country houses that they might like to fleetingly open their hitherto unseen grand gardens to the public was an instant success. Not only did the idea achieve its objective of providing charitable financial assistance to district nurses, it allowed people to visit gardens on an organised basis, and later saw the creation of the ‘Yellow Book’ National Gardens Scheme. Earlier, in 1913, the distinguished nurseryman Sir Harry Veitch advocated the use of the grounds of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea to provide a regular venue for the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS)’s annual outdoor flower show in central London. The relocation greatly improved the popularity of the annual show, thereby enabling thousands more people to view some of the best products of British horticulture.

The motives causing garden heroes and villains to behave as they did varied considerably. Surprisingly, one of the most powerful was jealousy. In 1894 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, devised a punitive tax which became known as death duty. Harcourt had been envious of his elder brother who was to inherit the family’s country estate and a place in the House of Lords, while he himself had, following Gladstone’s resignation, just been pipped for the top post of prime minister by Lord Rosebery. The long-term consequence, over several decades, of Harcourt’s tax was the destruction of hundreds of country houses and their gardens. Unexpectedly however, it had the beneficial effect of spurring the establishment of the National Trust; and it also eventually caused the Harcourt dynasty to lose its main country house. Another vengeful garden villain was Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, who built a magnificent garden near Rome to rival that of Pope Julius III (after he had been outmanoeuvred from becoming pope himself in 1550). His garden at the Villa d’Este influenced the building of garden fountains throughout Europe, with splendid designs derived from the ancient models of Heron of Alexandria.

Love them or loath them, gnomes were introduced into Britain through the Northamptonshire country estate of Sir Charles Isham, a well-meaning, reclusive baronet who never envisaged they would escape into so many suburban gardens. Then there was the rash of timber decking spurred by TV makeover programmes in recent years, and which has been much criticised for unduly dominating gardens at the expense of planting. In fact, decking was first perfected in the 1930s by Thomas Church, one of the United States’s most prestigious landscape architects. Church advocated timber decking as a stylish means to protect trees and plants – though he was insistent that it should only be done when it accorded with the existing garden.

Some heroically struggled to change prevailing opinions. John Rose did just that in 1665 when he insisted that vines could be successfully grown in England. Horticultural journalism, which until the 1820s had preponderantly been concerned with descriptions of plants, was revolutionised by John Claudius Loudon’s illustrated magazine’s encouragement of ingenious mechanical contraptions for suburban gardens. Then in the 1950s Lawrence Hills influentially campaigned to urge gardeners to grow produce using organic methods. The insecticide DDT, invented by Nobel Prize winner Paul Muller, was widely used in gardens until banned because of compelling observations made by the environmentalist Rachel Carson concerning its dangers to wildlife.

Thus garden heroes and villains varied from the unknown to the famous. In fact, as in real life, not only was it often the most unlikely persons who were the real heroes and villains, but they frequently became so almost by accident. At times the improvers’ intentions were selflessly altruistic, and sometimes garden heroes and villains influenced the appearance of gardens far beyond their own lifetimes. And, fortunately, the villains usually gave rise to saviours, and, in the long run, good often prevailed over evil.

1

Techno Wizards

Ferrabee Lawnmower. (Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1852)

Edwin Budding’s Lawnmower

In August 1830 a patent was filed for a grass-cutting contraption that was so revolutionary it would eventually enable virtually anyone to have an immaculate lawn. Hitherto, the absence of an effective mechanical means of cutting grass had meant that lawns had been the exclusive preserve of the privileged. For landowners who favoured a more systematic method than allowing livestock to nibble their green patches, lawn-cutting was usually done with a scythe, a primitive implement with a crescent-shaped blade that was swished to and fro on a long curved wooden handle.

Scything was quite a skill, as the social commentator William Cobbett noted: ‘A good short-grass mower is a really able workman.’ However, because grass could be cut only when heavy with damp, the hapless operatives had to work either in the early morning dew, or in the rain, or, occasionally and most grimly, at night by the light of torches or the moon – at the risk of horrendous personal injuries. As J.B. Papworth’s 1823 Hints on Ornamental Gardening noted, even sleeping householders were not immune from the fortnightly lawn scything procedure because of the mowers’ frequent use of sharpening stones to hone their blades, ‘generally at the time of the morning when such noises are most tormenting’! And yet, irrespective of the mower’s dexterity when using those fearsome cutters, the scythe unavoidably left many circular scars and unsightly irregular surfaces.

The only available cutting means other than the scythe was hand-shears, which were used at the edges of lawns and where the grass was too short or inaccessible under bushes. By advocating an enlarged version of that simple device, a Scottish landscape painter called Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840) dabbled at making the first mechanical grass-cutter. In the late eighteenth century Nasmyth ingeniously suggested cutting horticultural grass with a pair of 6ft-long shears. Unfortunately, his gigantic spring-loaded scissors worked only on seriously overgrown lawns and were so heavy and cumbersome that they had to be trundled about on a wheel!

The seemingly improbable venue of the really significant breakthrough in the development of lawn-cutting equipment was the bustling mill town of Stroud, which in the early nineteenth century was the hub of the Gloucestershire woollen industry, astride several converging valleys. The district had ambitions to improve its prosperity by enhancing its reputation as maker of smooth quality woollen products, and to facilitate this a race was on to find a means of cutting the rough imperfections and knotted blemishes (called ‘naps’) from the surface of its finished cloth. In 1815 the clothier John Lewis in the local village of Brimscombe reckoned he had solved the problem by means of a bench-mounted machine with a cylinder of rotating blades into which the cloth was fed. The cut was uneven, however, because the blades struck the cutting plate at intervals, but within weeks that important cropping difficulty was solved by Stephen Price. A Stroud engineer, Price was reputedly inspired by a napping machine that was invented in America (by someone called Mallory) and then imported to a local mill. In August 1815 Price patented a machine similar to Lewis’s except that the blades on the cylinders were curved, thus providing a continuous cut. Price’s device was apparently made at the Phoenix Mill foundry in Stroud and installed in numerous mills in the neighbouring valleys. At the nearby town of Dursley the machines were serviced by Edwin (Edward) Beard Budding, a technician who has since been variously described as a mechanic, foreman and carpenter.

Nasmyth’s early mower consisted of a pair of gigantic hand shears. (Stuart, Georgian Gardens, Robert Hale, 1979)

Budding had an aptitude for solving engineering problems, and already had the beginnings of a track record as the inventor of a variety of devices. Between 1825 and 1830 he designed a revolver that was more advanced than Samuel Colt’s patent of 1836. Later on he would also design an adjustable wrench and a lathe. Quite when he had the brainwave of wondering if the napping contraption could be adapted into being an effective means to cut grass is unclear, but that he did is beyond doubt.

Unlike so many seeking to profit from their innovations, Budding had the business nous not to be too greedy. Wisely reckoning he could best advance himself by sharing his discovery, in 1830 he went into business partnership with John Ferrabee, who had established the Phoenix Iron Works in 1828 and developed a reputation for producing quality engineering contraptions. By an agreement signed on 18 May 1830 their profits from the lawnmower were to be equally divided. John Ferrabee, who undertook to finance the cost of the revolutionary grass-cutter’s development, would have the right to manufacture, sell and license other manufacturers to produce lawnmowers. Edwin Budding’s responsibility would be to solve any technical difficulties in the lawnmower’s production.

Historically, although Budding came to be accepted as the inventor of the lawnmower, in his historic 1830 ‘Machine for Mowing Lawns’ patent, he very deliberately admitted that his device was essentially an innovation: ‘I do not claim as my Invention the separate parts of my machine, considered without reference to the effects to be produced by them; but I do claim as my Invention the described application and combination for the specified purpose.’ Unlike Price’s bench-mounted napping device, which needed to be driven by crank wheel or belt from a revolving waterwheel, the lawnmower was supposed to be pushed (although a second handle was provided so that, if required, it could also be pulled). In 1831 the prototype was made by Ferrabee to Budding’s design. The mower had a main roller that drove the whirling knives through a system of gears, which enabled those 19in cutting blades to rotate at twelve times the speed of the roller, and worked against a rigid knife bar on the underside of the machine.

Price’s 1815 cloth shearing machine, which Edwin Budding innovated by rotating it through 90 degrees to convert into a lawnmower! (Patent Office, 1815)

The Budding lawnmower went on sale in 1832 at a cost of 7 guineas, which included a grass box and wooden packing case (the manufacturer’s catalogue also offered package and delivery ‘to any principal railway station in the United Kingdom’). Technically brilliant though Edwin Budding might have been, he was also commercially minded enough to allow his radical new machine to be presented as being enormously fun to use. Thus, conspicuous in the otherwise dour wordage of his 1830 mower patent, were the encouraging words: ‘Country gentlemen may find in using my machine themselves an amusing, useful, and healthy exercise.’ In 1831 one of the very earliest mowers went into service at the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park. According to an enthusiastic article in the Gardener’s Magazine soon afterwards, the foreman, Mr Curtis, claimed to be entirely delighted with the machine which ‘does as much work as six or eight men with scythes and brooms . . . performing the whole so perfectly as not to leave a mark of any kind’.

However, the operational reality was that the cast-iron lawnmower was so heavy, that when covering large areas it often took two persons to cut with it. Other practical difficulties were that the cutting cylinder immediately at the front of the machine was so close to the ground that sometimes it would (contrary to the London Zoo’s glowing endorsement) catch mounds on the surface and lurch the machine into the ground, thus leaving an uneven height of cut; and the contraption had an exposed cogwheel drive which made it extremely noisy. According to the Gardener’s Magazine, ‘so great was the noise caused by these cogwheel machines, that in most establishments they could not be used while the family was in residence before 8am, when the inmates had risen’. So not much improvement from the scythe!

Ferrabee soon realised that, although his own selling network was well established, he needed to reach a wider market. In 1832 Ransomes of Ipswich, already renowned as manufacturers of plough shares and other agricultural machinery, were sold a licence to produce and wholesale the Budding mower. Another licensee was James Shanks, a Scottish engineer in Arbroath. When a Budding lawnmower purchased to cut the 2½ acres of lawns on the wealthy W.F. Carnegie’s Arbroath estate was found to be not up to the job, Shanks was asked to build a 27in-wide mower that could be pulled by two horticultural labourers, or a pony. The latter proved to be the most effective when cutting was carried out in dry weather, since the pony left no hoof marks on the grass and enabled Carnegie to cut his lawns in less than three hours. In 1842 Shanks registered the design in Scotland of an even larger such machine, 42in wide (the term ‘shanks’s pony’ reputedly originated from this innovation). Budding’s patent only covered England and Wales, because until 1852 Scotland still had its own patent regulations. Nonetheless, in 1841 Ferrabee had travelled to Scotland to check with Shanks that there were no infringements. The use of animal power was established and some horticultural firms even began selling leather galoshes to protect lawns from damage by the ponies’ hooves.

Regardless of the practical usefulness of Budding’s radical machine, sales were such that by the early 1850s a total of only some 4,000 mowers had been sold. This was partly because the mower was still too far ahead of its time: the idea of suburban lawns had still not really caught on; nor had the explosion of enthusiasm for sports played on grass, such as lawn tennis, cricket, golf and football. Also, the hitherto innovative Budding inexplicably seems to have made virtually no attempt to improve on his original design. During the 1830s he and Ferrabee had merely extended their product range with 16in and 22in machines, and then 30in and 36in devices in 1852. But now there was a sense of desperation because the Patent Office had started to allow improvements in design to be patented, which opened up the field to others. Thus, even though Budding’s simple ‘penny-farthing’ chassis format would remain the mainstay of popular lawnmower design, it would be others who would find the solutions to the significant improvements that needed to be made.

It was Ransomes of Ipswich, for example, who solved the problem of the revolving cutting cylinder colliding with the ground. Having realised the fault was a matter of imbalance caused by the small wooden roller behind the cutting cylinder being too close to the rear drive roller, Ransomes placed the cylinder between the rollers – a brilliantly simple solution that led to an even cut. In terms of the lawnmower’s irritatingly noisy gears, Budding had proffered the cure in his 1830 patent, which stated: ‘The revolving parts may be made to be driven by endless lines, or bands, instead of teeth.’ Astonishingly, nothing was done about this until 1859, when Thomas Green, a Leeds blacksmith, patented the world’s first chain-driven lawnmower. This too had a conventional ‘penny-farthing’ chassis, but compared to the Budding gear-drive mowers was virtually noiseless. New forms of propulsion were then applied. In 1892 James Sumner of the Leyland Steam Motor Company produced the first ever steam-powered mower, although it did nothing to solve the lawnmower weight problem, because it weighed 1½ tons! Seven years later Ransome’s patented the first ever petrol-driven lawnmower, a cumbersome 42in contraption ideal for sports fields.

By then had appeared a machine that offered amateur gardeners an affordable means of mowing. In 1869 Budding’s penny-farthing format was superseded by the Manchester firm Follows and Bates, who devised a patent mower known as the Climax. Instead of having an extremely heavy main roller, that device cleverly had two large, though lightweight, outside side wheels with internal cogs, through which the cutting cylinder was driven. This meant that the machine had few parts and was therefore much lighter. It sold for virtually a fraction of the old Budding machines: compact, 6in-wide mowers ideal for cottage gardeners could be bought for 10s 6d. Appropriately, because the side-wheelers were especially effective on coarse grass, they sold exceedingly well to gardeners in America – from where, ironically, the idea for the inspirational cloth-napping machine might have originated.

James Sharp’s Metal Roller

Before the invention of the lawnmower, unsightly scars on lawns, caused by cutting with a scythe, had to be smoothed over with a heavy roller. The early rollers were mostly made from tree sections attached to ‘A’-shaped frames of timber, or even wrought-iron. The disadvantage of wooden rollers was that they were susceptible to rot and their symmetrical shape could become uneven. The only alternative was to use stone rollers, which, though heavy and better suited to crushing gravel paths, were durable. Nevertheless, no matter how well the early wooden and stone rollers were made, they all suffered from being awkward to steer. All that changed in 1773 when the horticultural machine supplier James Sharp devised a divided roller. At his premises in the City of London’s Leadenhall Street, Sharp began making and selling the revolutionary all cast-iron contraptions which had two – and sometimes three or more – rollers. With the cylinders revolving independently, the entire roller was now far easier to turn. Some of Sharp’s rollers had a brake mechanism in the form of a simple counterweighted arm, which, when released, would swing vertically and make the roller stationary.

Iron rollers invented and sold by James Sharp in the 1770s had: (a) divided rollers for better steering, and (b) counterweighted arms for easier moving and braking. (James Sharp, Descriptions of Some Utensils, London, 1773)

Sadly, Edwin Budding never lived to see the numerous variations of his ingenious machine in popular use. In 1846 he died of a stroke, aged only 50. The lawnmower, it seems, did not make him wealthy, nor did it warrant his receiving an obituary or any form of visual portrait. In his later years, although a trusted partner at the Phoenix Iron Works, he eked out a living at the nearby town of Dursley as an engineer at Lister’s, successfully working to improve the perpetual carding machine, which had inspired his original lawnmower idea. Subsequently, and despite his position as a garden hero, he was also seen as something of a villain because it was his lawnmower that created the tyranny of all gardeners being obliged to be seen to have tidy lawns.

Original Budding lawnmowers can be seen at the Stroud Museum, www.stroud.gov.uk and Old Lawnmower Club, Milton Keynes, www.oldlawnmowerclub.co.uk. See also the British Lawnmower Museum, www.lawnmowerworld.co.uk.

John Aitken’s Chainsaw

Now the most destructive and controversial horticultural tool – tainted by involvement in the destruction of rainforests – the chainsaw is often assumed to have been invented in the 1920s by a German engineer called Andreas Stihl. It was, in fact, originally devised in the late eighteenth century as a medical instrument!

Its creator was John Aitken, an Edinburgh surgeon who lectured on chemistry, anatomy, medicine and surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Of his early life not much is known other than that he probably learnt his trade in Edinburgh and published books on medical subjects, such as Principles of Midwifery or Puerperal Medicine (1784). It sold at a price of 2s 6d, and the good-hearted doctor donated the proceeds to an Edinburgh maternity hospital he had founded in 1784. Then followed A System of Obstetrical Tables with Explanations (1786). It was in these works that Dr Aitken outlined and illustrated devices for use in obstetrics. One, which he invented himself, was the chain or ‘flexible’ saw. Before the introduction of this device, surgeons operating on bones had needed to use a scalpel or conventional medical saw, which all too often unavoidably caused considerable collateral damage to tissue and organs around the bone that required sawing.

Aitken’s saw consisted of two handles connected by a serrated steel chain (like a miniature bicycle chain) with sharp teeth cutting on the convex surface. The cutting contraption was introduced by means of a curved needle passed through the soft tissue around the bone. When the saw was in position the needle was replaced by a handle, and then the second handle was attached. The device would then be pulled back and forth around the bone to be cut off. Use of the chainsaws meant there tended to be less need for limb amputation, which at the time was standard treatment for severely infected and damaged bones. Almost simultaneous (in 1786) another Scottish doctor, James Jeffray, who was a surgeon in Glasgow, apparently invented a remarkably similar saw, except that his was modelled on a watch chain. In 1876 Tieman & Company, a firm of medical instrument-makers, patented a saw consisting of two handles connected by a wire of cast steel on which were strung a series of steel beads with sharp cutting edges. Nevertheless, for much of the nineteenth century, Aitken’s simple chainsaw was a useful surgical instrument which seemed to require no modification.

The next evolutionary step in chainsaw evolution occurred forty-six years after John Aitken’s death in 1790. In 1830 a German doctor of orthopaedics called Bernard Heine invented the first mechanical mechanism for a chainsaw. His ‘Osteotome’ consisted of angle-set cutting teeth attached to an endless chain that was guided by a blade around two sprockets driven by a handle on one of the sprockets. The device was said to be an improvement when performing amputations because it sometimes avoided the need to use a hammer and chisel. But the speed of the hand gearing was low and the saw ricocheted off compact bone, thus making it difficult to control. However, it made Heine a medical celebrity and in 1834 won him the coveted Prix Montyon of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In 1894 the ‘Osteotome’ was improved on by Leonardo Gigli, an Italian obstetrician who introduced a fine twisted wire saw, which provided a narrower and quicker cut.

Medical chainsaw similar to Aitken’s 1785 invention. (Grimshaw, Saws, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1880)

Surprisingly, it was quite a while before thought was given to adapting this medical technology for forestry work. Although thoughts of pre-chain-saw cutting equipment are likely to be of chopping down trees with axes, various forms of saw had been in use for a considerable time. The sturdiest of these was the crosscut ‘ripsaw’, which was introduced into Britain by the Romans for cutting planks and beams, and required two men to operate it. By the nineteenth century the crosscut saw was the generally preferred device for felling trees over 1ft in diameter. It was regarded as being more effective than the bowsaw with a wooden frame, which though commonplace in that century, was too heavy, since the blades had to be wide and thick because they could not be tensioned.

Chainsaws were used for surgery in the nineteenth century. (Grimshaw, Saws, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1880)

In 1777 Samuel Miller invented the first circular saw, a round metal disk that had to be table-mounted – being immobile, it could not be taken into woodlands. The Hamilton saw, invented in 1861, was hand-cranked and resembled a spinning wheel. Yet that also was too cumbersome to be effective. Another promising development ought to have been the bandsaw, which was invented in 1808. Consisting of a flexible band of metal edged with teeth it was rotated between large leather-covered pulleys on a bench. However, the construction of the blades offered a paradoxical problem: they had to be soft and flexible to pass readily around the pulleys at a light speed, without breaking; and yet they also had to be sufficiently hard to receive and maintain a keen cutting edge, and stiff enough to resist the pushing tendency of a high feed. It was many decades before a strong enough blade for the bandsaw was invented, and when it was it could not cope with really thick wood, nor did it have the mobility to be operable in forests.

Attention then focused on adding some mechanical advantage to conventional reciprocating saws. The most technically advanced of these was the ‘Steam Tree-Felling Machine’ made by Ransome & Co. Essentially this was a railway-type piston connected by pipes to a boiler and mounted on an adjustable sledge to enable it to cut trees at ground level, or crosscut large sections of felled timber. Unfortunately, when tested by British foresters in a teak plantation in Burma in 1883 the machine went horribly wrong. In 1894 James Brown noted in The Forester the difficulty in generating a high pressure of steam, and because the saw strained in gripping the tree, it several times bounced about, risking serious accidents to the operatives.

Original bandsaw of 1808. (Grimshaw, Saws, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1880)

Patents issued at the Patent Office in London in the years before the 1930s show that even then inventors were struggling to devise contraptions that could cut forest timber efficiently. In 1925 J.T. Pickles advised using a bandsaw machine on a U-shaped frame; in 1909 J.H. Pattenden suggested a reciprocating saw machine supported by giant springs attached to portable stands; E.J. Pepper in 1916 tried to solve the problem of mobility and lightness by recommending a reciprocating device pivoted on a tractor; in 1917 A. Holmberg’s solution was a reciprocating saw powered by a petrol motor on a cart; while in 1911 Agar, Cross & Co. wanted to put a circular saw on a swinging frame attached to a steam tractor, and in 1919 suggested a circular saw on a tracked vehicle.

Before the invention of chainsaws, trees were sometimes cut by steam saws. (Grimshaw, Saws, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1880)

So far there was still no one who had sought to apply Aitken’s bone-cutting tool to the work of slicing up wood. The Californian inventor R.L. Muir might have been the first person to put blades on a chain and thus invent the first chainsaw for logging purposes, but his invention, weighing hundreds of pounds, was not a commercial success. The eventual populariser of the hand-held mobile chainsaw was the German mechanical engineer Andreas Stihl, the founder of a company for making boiler pre-firing systems. In 1926 Stihl patented the ‘Cutoff Chain Saw for Electric Power’. Then in 1929 he patented a petrol-engined, hand-held, ‘tree-felling machine’ – which weighed 101lb! At the time he made no attempt to acknowledge the prior technology of medical chainsaws. His Stuttgart-based company went on to become the first European firm to export chainsaws to America and Russia. In 1931 he produced a much improved, light and powerful 2-cycle 8hp motor for use by the German Army, which overcame the problem of so many early petrol saws – a weight disproportionate to the horsepower ratio. In 1950 Stihl developed the first chain-saw to be operated by one person. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that the first lightweight 5hp horticultural chainsaw, a 14lb model produced by Stihl in 1967, was so similar in appearance to the hand-operated surgical devices developed during the nineteenth century from Aitken’s original invention.

A heroic labour-saving device though the chainsaw was to gardeners and professional woodmen, it became the bête noire of conservationists, who considered it to be a fiendishly inexpensive contraption used in developing countries to destroy ecologically valuable forests. The environmental madness of cutting, clearing and burning South American forests was spelt out as early as 1877 in The Causes of Drought and the Necessity of Afforestation, written by the Venezuelan engineer Julio Churion. His warnings went unheeded.