The view from above is extraordinary. While there are scorched gardens and tinder-dry fields as far as the eye can see, Stuart Grindle’s lawn, in this little corner of Yorkshire, remains lush and lovely. And so dazzlingly green – as if God has been messing with the filter.
‘I’ll be getting hate mail if you use an aerial shot,’ jokes the 83-year-old retired joiner.
‘It happened before. I think it was when ITV sent a drone up. My lawn was emerald green when everyone else’s was brown. I had letters saying, “Why are you watering your lawn when there’s a drought?”.’
Good question: why is he?
‘For starters, we don’t have a hosepipe ban here at the moment,’ Stuart points out.
‘And people want to look a bit closer at the pictures. You’ll see I have four water butts. I’m very water conscious. To be honest, I don’t even like putting tap water on the lawn, the grass doesn’t like it.
‘And when I do put the sprinkler on – I have a 360 degree one – I only have it on for ten or 15 minutes. Gardens don’t want more. Grass wants to be damp, not wet.
‘Where people get it wrong is that they put the sprinkler on and then go and watch Coronation Street. Your grass won’t thank you for it.’
Stuart Grindle from Tickhill, Doncaster who has a competition winning garden that he is managing to keep luscious green in the heatwave
The garden takes hours of work to maintain, by Stuart, pictured with his wife Anne in 2018
Stuart confessed to spending up to 16 hours a day, and tens of thousands of pounds over the years, tending his lawn
Besides, Stuart pays £1,200 a year for his water: he’s on a fixed rate. He had words with someone from Yorkshire Water over this last year, when there WAS a hosepipe ban.
‘I said “if I buy a three piece suite – a sofa and two chairs – from John Lewis, they won’t send them to me and say “you can’t sit in the chairs”.’
Why am I here, on one of the hottest days of the year, sitting in Stuart’s little oasis of a garden in Tickhill, Doncaster, doing little more than watching the grass grow (to be fair, it’s mesmerising. And a little addictive)?
Because when it comes to working out how to maintain England’s green and pleasant land, Stuart is your man.
It is now nine years since Stuart won a competition to find Britain’s best lawn. In 2017, his garden – his life’s work – became a national talking point, an object both of lust and fascination.
The man who confessed to spending up to 16 hours a day, and tens of thousands of pounds over the years, tending his lawn, who’d been known to get down on his knees with kitchen scissors to perfect the edges, became an overnight sensation.
Gardener’s World sent a camera crew (‘my wife, Anne, was hoping for Monty Don, but she didn’t get him’) and a German newspaper sent a reporter to test the springiness underfoot.
‘He arrived and said “I’ve brought you a present, Mr Grindle”, but it was a garden gnome. I said, “I’ll find somewhere for it”.’
You’re not a garden gnome man, then? ‘I am not,’ he says.
The German reporter proudly showed him photographs of his lawn. Stuart was not impressed: ‘It wanted digging up. It wanted a cultivator. I asked how often he cut it and he said “quite regularly, at least once every two weeks”. I was cutting mine twice a day at that point.’
Having agreed to open his lawn to the public, all proceeds to charity, Stuart (and the long-suffering Anne, who called herself a lawn-widow) found himself inundated with visitors.
Then there were the weddings. One bride asked what it would cost her to have her wedding pictures taken on his lawn. He said “it will cost you nowt, lass”, and along came the wedding party.
‘I did tell her she’d have to take her shoes off because I can’t have stilettos on my lawn,’ he recalls. Happily for him (and the grass), she was happy to go barefoot.
Of course, we all love looking at other people’s lawns, particularly when our own have shrivelled up and died.
Today we chat about singer Rod Stewart’s lawn in Essex, which has been in the papers looking strikingly vivid.
Stuart would like to know what grass seed Rod uses (his own favourite is ‘Bent’, which is the stuff they use on golf greens, and is so fine you can’t use it if there is any wind at all).
Sir Rod Stewart’s Grade II-listed mansion has very green gardens despite the dry weather
Sir Rod’s mini golf course features a fairway, two bunkers and a lush putting green
He tells me, however, that his mowing days are over. What wasn’t reported at the time of his lawn-fame is that he’d already had a double hip-replacement, after a lifelong battle with arthritis. He was diagnosed at the age of 28 and had his first hip replacement at 36.
He’s now had six new hips (‘they call them “revisions” after the first set’). He also has two new shoulders, and he walks with a stick. Even getting to the end of the garden is a struggle.
Pushing a lawn-mower, even his beloved machine which cuts to 5mm? He hasn’t done it for years. He can no longer get down on his knees for forensic examination, either.
So how on earth is this garden still looking so splendid? This is partly down to his son Jonathan, who now lives with him, and who knows his way around a pair of pruning shears, but mostly because of his friend Dan, who tends the greens of a local golf course.
‘He comes and does my garden for me. No charge,’ Stuart says. ‘He does it because he’s marvellous and because he knows what it means to me. I’m the luckiest man in the world.’
Dan pops in most days. He’s doing the edging at the moment, down on his knees, refusing tea. ‘I direct operations,’ says Stuart.
Glen, the photographer who hung out of the upstairs bedroom window years ago, has come back to take the pictures today, and shows Stuart the old images on his phone. He assesses them with the most critical eye on the planet.
‘It was in better shape then,’ he says of his grass, ‘but it’s not too bad now in comparison. But because we’ve had this drought. We’re in maintenance mode. It’s just a case of keeping it alive.’
One of the most striking images from before is of Stuart and Anne standing proudly in the middle of their garden, arms outstretched. He takes the phone and gives the image a little kiss. Anne died in December. This has been the first summer without her. It has been a long one.
‘Dementia,’ he says. ‘She had it for about three years. It was awful towards the end. She got quite violent. She didn’t know what she was doing. We had to lock the doors.
‘She stopped eating in about September, I mean just stopped, wouldn’t have more than a spoonful of yoghurt. She was in hospital eventually, then a nursing home at the end.’
He had Dan plant a little memorial garden for Anne halfway down, behind a tree called a Lace Lady which sweeps elegantly over the lawn. There is now a little bench there, which we meander down to (I’m only allowed on the grass because I have trainers on). The dwarf conifers are coming on nicely in this shaded spot.
‘I’ll be getting hate mail if you use an aerial shot,’ jokes the 83-year-old retired joiner
Stuart has kept his garden green despite the heatwave
Stuart pictured in 2024 watering his garden, which was previously named ‘Britain’s Best Lawn’
‘I just sit and think about her. Little Annie. We rarely had a cross word, you know. We met at 17, married at 21. She was the only one for me.’
How did you know she was the one? ‘The nurse’s uniform,’ he deadpans. They met at a youth club and married in 1964, living with his mother at first then buying their first home (complete with postage stamp sized garden) in Maltby.
In 1969 they moved to a new development in Worksop and in 1973 Jonathan was born. There was a golf course nearby, however, and Stuart found himself gazing at the green and becoming ‘a little obsessed’.
His next door neighbour’s father was a green keeper and they got chatting about grass seed. It wasn’t until they moved to this house, in 1976, that they had a sizeable garden to work with.
It was scrubland before Stuart got to grips with it, and even then he let friends use it as an allotment before his passion really took over. ‘I sowed the seed myself,’ he recalls. ‘No turf here. And then I watched it grow …’
Half a century on, he’s still watching. He has a keen eye. ‘I don’t like gardens that go up and down, that’s why there are no straight lines in mine. The eye has to be drawn. You go “oh, that’s interesting, what’s over there”.
How much has he spent on this garden over the years? ‘I’d say about £60,000’. That’s not including the man hours.
When he was working Stuart would get up at 6am to ‘swish’ (basically brush the lawn), then come home from work and immediately get to mowing. After retirement, he could spend entire days on his grass. He never let Jonathan kick a football on the lawn. They couldn’t go on extended holidays because the garden couldn’t handle the neglect.
Dare we ask if he will ever leave his garden, or worse, let nature take over? He’s already let a couple of sections go, ‘but no, I’d find that very hard. It’s my life’s work, this is 50 years of my life, of Anne. I’ll leave it when they carry me out.’
Will he care about what happens after he is no longer here, then? He says Jonathan is unlikely to keep the garden. ‘Nope. He’ll sell up, and maybe some young couple will come in, with two little snappers, and rip it all up.’
What if they put down – the horror! – artificial grass, and have an entire family of garden gnomes? ‘I won’t be here,’ he says. ‘They can do what they like. That’s the thing about a garden. It’s personal.
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