FACTORALY - E89 GRASS

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Grass is everywhere. You can wear it, you can eat it, you can drink it, you can play on it - you can even grow it underwater. Grass is vital to the health of the planet and everyone on it. In this episode, we run our fingers through this wonderful plant in all its iterations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Bruce. G'day Simon. And hello to everyone who's listening. Hi there. My name is Simon Wells. And my name is Bruce Fielding and we are both professional voiceover artists. We are? That's why you sound like this. Yes, indeed. We have decent studios and decent microphones. And not too bad voices, one hopes. Yeah well, the wonders of technology. I actually sound like this in real life. Yeah. So we are here presenting to you Fact-orally, which is... How would you describe it, Bruce?

I would describe it as facts. Orally. Fine, yes. We are fact-loving, trivia-researching nerds. Sadly, yes. And each week we come here and we pick a particular subject and we chat about it for about half an hour or so. That's right. And all you lovely folks get to listen to us do so. And we have a randomized

subject picker and this week the randomized subject picker has picked grass. It's picked some grass. It's a big subject. Isn't it? Yep. It's another big subject isn't it? Yep it's another one of those ones that looks like it should be nice and simple but it actually seems to cover half of the living organisms in the planet. 26%. 26%? Yeah. Really? Crikey. 26% of all plant life is grass. Cool so this will be nice and succinct then. Well, of course there are, there are things that are grass that don't look like grass.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So we get, we'll get onto this. I'm sure you will. Why it's called grass. Okay. So the, you, the word grass, uh, it means grass means grass, which is nice and easy. From an old English word, grass, from Proto-Germanic, grass, which was from Proto-Indo-European, grass. But that version of grass meant to grow. And from that word, we also get greys and green. They're all connected. Yes, well, there's a place called Grasse in France where they grow all the perfume. Oh, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. In fact, I see our episode on perfume, I think we mentioned grass in there maybe. I expect we probably did, it seems like the sort of thing we would do. Yeah. The definition of grass is a little bit trickier than the etymology of grass.

We all know what grass is. I would imagine that when you say the word grass to anyone, they sort of picture short green things that grow in the lawn and you mow it and that's what grass is. Yes and... It's really not. I found a fabulously complicated series of definitions from the OED, saying that grass is a common wild plant, specifically referring to plants from the Poa cii category, which are categorised by their narrow leaves, hollow stems and wind pollinated flowers. So that doesn't actually apply to an awful lot of grasses. There are some grasses to which that does not apply,

so that doesn't help. Then I looked up this weird family name that I just read, Poeaceae. Poeaceae, also called Griminnaeae, is a large and nearly ubiquitous family of the Monocoto-Ledinus flowering plants, commonly known as grass. They're not helpful. Not helpful at all. I think that mono thing is it's because it comes from one ovary, I think. Yes, that's right. One flower from one ovary. I think. Yes, that's right. One flower from one ovary, which puts me in mind of the definition of a berry.

Yes. But a berry is not a grass. Neither is a grassy berry. So why? Unless it's a grassberry. Oh, well, heck, that's just something different altogether. There are over 12,000 species of grass. Yes. So we're not going to name them all. I mean it's not just the green stuff. No. I mean bamboo is grass. Yes it

is. I mean you know if I said to you that grass can grow up to 150 feet. It's it's pretty impressive isn't it? Yes that's it that would take a lot of mowing. Yes it would wouldn't it. Yes, it would wouldn't it? I mean technically palm trees are a grass. Are they really? Yeah. Huh. There are things that are grass that you don't think of as grass. Such as? Such as rice, wheat, corn, sugarcane, barley, rye. Just lots and lots and lots of things that are technically grass. Just lots and lots and lots of things that are technically grass

Yeah So anytime that we're talking about crops any episode on bread that may come along in the future Alcohol alcohol. Yes, the growing of barley to turn into beer and whiskey. Where would we be without grass? Yeah, it's phenomenal sugarcane As you said some varieties of Sedge but not reeds. I always thought reeds were a variety of grass. Apparently they're not. And papyrus, which I had always thought was a type of grass, is not. So some things are grass that you don't think are

and some things aren't that you thought were. But it grows everywhere. It does. You find grass absolutely everywhere across the whole planet, including Antarctica. Really? Including Antarctica? But that's quite icy, isn't it? It is, but there's like a very fine sort of thin hair, hair sort of looking grass that

grows in Antarctica. Oh really? Yeah. Huh. That's quite unusual, isn't it, to find a plant that grows in every continent. Yes, very unusual. Hence the 26% of all the plant life on earth. Yeah sure. Grass has been around for a while. The first fossilized evidence of grass dates back to the late Cretaceous periods and it's very versatile. You, it can grow in lush rainforests.

It can grow in arid deserts. Yes, it's it's just everywhere. Thus endeth our episode. Goodbye. I mean, there's some old old grass that's still around and there's seagrass in the Mediterranean. That's 200,000 years old. Really?

Yeah. That's quite an old grass. That's a very old grass. Huh. You know, sort of when you go out for a walk either in the park or through a field or whatever, you're generally happy to accept the fact that you're walking on grass and that's it. But if you get down and have a proper look at it, there's an awful lot of different varieties from the sort of the thin straw looking stuff to the wide reedy looking things that you can put between your hands and blow like a reed instrument. Yeah.

All the way through to the tall fluffy stuff to the spiky little things that you can chuck at someone and it sticks on their cardigan. Yeah. Loads of varieties. Apparently in the UK we have 160 varieties which is quite a lot. Of the 12,000 whatever. Of the 12,000 worldwide, yeah exactly. So it's relative. But in this country we have varieties of grass called fescue, ryegrass, Bermuda grass, Kentucky bluegrass.

Now that's a sort of music. Well yes exactly, yeah, bluegrass music. I didn't even look into where the crossover comes there but they're all just types of grass because they have the word grass in their title so they're quite hard to define. But as you say if you get down on your knees and have a look at some grass what you're looking at especially if it's like a lawn or something like that there are about six grass plants to every square inch of the lawn. Really? Wow. So the average garden has about seven million grass plants in it.

Goodness me. The definition earlier on, which apparently doesn't apply to all grasses, but the fact that they are propagated by the wind so their seeds blow on the wind the seeds land elsewhere you get more grass apparently that is why grass is green plants are green because of photosynthesis that's a chlorophyll exactly chlorophyll so you know that's that's good for photosynthesis but because the the seeds are spread on the air they're not spread by insects therefore the grass doesn't need to be colorful in order to

attract bees or anything like that so that's why it's green yes or vice versa it also accounts for a massive amount of the oxygen carbon dioxide chain yeah where it sort of changes carbon dioxide into oxygen. Yeah. It's quite yummy as well. Is it? Have you been asking your friends the sheep again? Well not just sheep. It's actually the most common food in the world. Really? Well if you think about it, everything eats grass. Everything from like insects through sort of like small mammals to larger mammals. Yes. You know, apart from us, well, except we do eat grass when we eat bread. Well, exactly. Yeah. So we eat the corn and the rye and the rice and the maize and the barley.

Yeah. So grass as a thing is the most popular food in the world. Wow. That's a great fact. Yeah. I mean grass is very good for the environment as well. Because grass stabilises earth so you don't get erosion quite so much. It also stores water in the earth which makes the earth a better medium for growing things in and it shades the earth from the sun. Think about it. So if you've got grass over earth the sunshine doesn't hit the earth from the Sun. Think about it. So if you've got grass over earth, the sunshine doesn't hit the earth.

Yeah, true. So it's actually a very healthy, good thing to have. Unless it's in your garden. I seem to recall there has been an awful lot of arguments against having lawns in recent years. Oh, this thing about wild gardening. Yeah, so for all the good that grass does on the whole in the wild out in nature, the more suburban area that's covered with grass, because it's so well cultivated and it's so pristine and perfect and so on, it doesn't really give way to an awful lot of biodiversity.

So for every square metre of lawn that's a square meter less wild habitat for flowers, butterflies, insects, small animals, etc. etc. So there has been this move to sort of, you know, at least give a patch of your beautifully manicured lawn to a wildflower area. And there are some organizations who are really quite adamant that lawns are going to destroy the world. Yeah. Well, I mean, they can destroy the world in all sorts of ways. They take a lot of watering, for example. That's true. I mean, I couldn't believe this when I read it, but I checked it and it's true.

The French, they use 6% of their entire water usage is in watering grass. Right. In America they use 70%. Seven zero. Seven zero to water lawns. Flip. Yeah. Do they have particularly thirsty lawns or are their lawns bigger?

I just think that Americans like a water lawn. Whenever you drive through some areas of America, everybody has their sprinklers on all the time. It's a lot of water. Do you know who is generally credited for the first manicured lawn in America? Would it be George Washington? Close. Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson? It's been totally

disproven unfortunately. There were other people who got into lawns before him but he was sort of quite a famous one so Thomas Jefferson lived in an estate called Monticello. Unfortunately my brain automatically starts going to Hamilton lyrics here so I'm distracted. I was going to Limoncello. Yeah sure. And yes in the early 1800s he took on the idea of the English style lawn, this sort of lovely, well cultivated, nice and short, pretty looking, ornate landscaped garden that

had become very very prevalent in England in the, the preceding couple of centuries through the likes of landscape gardeners like Capability Brown and so on. You know, you think of any decent national trust property or stately home or palace or anything, you know, roles and roles and roles of beautifully manicured lawns. And Jefferson quite liked the idea and thought it looked quaint even after the whole You know incident of wanting to separate themselves from anything English related He then decided to create an English style lawn Maybe just as a little memory of the old days. I don't know. Yes But yeah, he's sort of quite famous as being the first American to have an English style lawn

If you didn't use animals to cut your lawn, hmm have an English style lawn. If you didn't use animals to cut your lawn, you could use lots and lots of manpower with scythes, you know, a bit like sort of old father time or death. One of the people who promoted this idea of the beautiful manicured English lawn was a garden designer called Capability Brown. Do you know what his first name was? Oh I did, is it John? Nope. Bob, Dave, Brian, Capability, George. So he was, Capability was his nickname. Right. But think of Knights of the Run Table. Lancelot. Correct. Really Lancelot Brown. Oh that's

fantastic. Yes he was like the most famous landscape designer of the 18th century. Yeah, yeah. Really, really popular. I've been to a few of his gardens that they're quite something. Yeah, so I think they're quite impressive aren't they? But when you finish with the scythe, then what replaces the scythe? Well, unless you've got sort of sheep or cows around, if we're talking about manual cutting... We're talking about Edwin Budding. Mr. Budding. Mr. Budding of Gloucestershire.

Well, he actually grew up in Thrup in Gloucestershire. Okay. Who invented the lawnmower in 1830. Wonderful. Apparently, he was inspired by a local cloth mill, which had a cutting cylinder. It sort of had a cylinder with blades on it that was rolled over the cloth to sort of trim the irregular nap on the cloth and make it all smooth and nicely finished.

And he thought to himself, well, if I could put that on a set of wheels and build a frame around it and push it over the grass, then maybe it could do the same thing. Yes. So it was just a hand-powered lawnmower. And that was later than I would have thought. It's like 1830. Yes, I thought it would have been earlier than that as well. And that was what they call a reel type or a cylinder type mower. And then a little bit later on in 1899 in America there's a guy called John Burr who invented the rotary mower Ah, right, okay

Unusually he's a black inventor in America in the 19th century quite unusual. Good on him I think I remember reading at one point that there was once a steam-powered lawnmower People have used everything to power They were dragged by animals. They were pushed by people And then sort of later on in the 80s you got things like the hover mower. Oh yes, flymow. Flymow. There's a wonderful advertising campaign for Qualcast which had a famous line, it's a lot

less bother than a hover. But the lawnmow is quite interesting. Especially if you race them. Oh yes, they do this, don't they? Mainly in America. No, in the UK as well. Do they? Yeah, yeah, there's the British Lawn Mower Racing Association.

Okay, right. Many, many, many years ago, I took part in an endurance 12-hour lawn mower race. Did you? Yeah, I did a stint. Every now and then, these little nuggets of Bruce's past pop up to delight us all. So lawn mower racing is actually really, it's about 50 years old. It was started in about 1973. And the idea was that it was for racing drivers who got fed up with how much it was costing

to race cars. Okay. And I thought, okay, if we can't race cars, what can we race that's cheaper than a car? And some madman said, I know. Actually, it was it was a couple of people in a pub. Of course it was these things always start the best invention. And they decided to divide it up into various different categories and classes. There was no sort of the ride on petrol mowers, aren't they? Yes. And the rule is there are no sponsors, so you have to make every mower yourself and race it yourself. Oh I see, okay.

There's no big money comes into it, the idea is to keep it cheap. Okay. I mean you can buy a racing lawnmower for about two grand I think. Can you? Yeah. They come in three categories,

group one, which is run behind. So that's the one where you sort of, that there's a machine that goes along and you just run behind it. You push it. They're quite hard. Group two, which is roller driven. So there's actually, you sit behind it.

So it's like the mower is in front of you and you have like a carriage at the back of it that's dragging you along on wheels. Yeah, it's almost like you're sort of sitting in a buggy with a horse in front. Exactly exactly like that Yes, and then there's group three which is the sit upon And they got to about sort of 13 horsepower They're quite quick. Yeah, I'm making it up to 50 miles an hour Really the graces take place in a farmer's. The farmer will sort of mow a track.

Yeah. Step one, take off the blades. Step two, get on the mower and just go for it. Right, so they are purely there to race as a vehicle. Yes. There's no element of actually mowing that's involved. No, no mowing at all. Right, okay. There is a group four which is, it's tractors but it's not really, they're not really a proper mower. No, they're not, that's cheating. But the tractors can get up to about a hundred horsepower. Crikey. Which is quite fast. It's a lot of horses. Great. Well I'm impressed that you've partaken. That's brilliant. So I had a quick look at sort of the origin of lawns in general.

It's quite hard to determine when exactly they came about. But apparently the word lawn was an old 16th century French word, lawned, which just meant heath. And it sort of referred to any public grazing ground or common land or whatever that you could sort of take your cattle or your horses or whatever to graze. In the new forest here in England, there are areas called the lawns because they're just sort of big open grassy grazing areas.

And other than grazing your livestock one of the first reasons that anyone sort of maintained and manicured and hemmed in an area of lawn was for sport. Yes. Because a nice flat bit of grass is good for playing playing sports on and as early as the 1100s they were being used for early sports. You know you think of all the grass sports, football, cricket, golf, rugby, tennis, lawn bowling, they all require a nice smooth bit of grass. In 1159 in Japan we saw the first use of turf or sod. So laying a bit of turf, a bit of earth with grass atop it, rather than sort of planting grass from seed. That was the first time we saw anyone laying

turf to make a garden. And then it sort of spread from there. But but yeah the idea of someone in the 1100s in Japan laying turf seems unusual to me. I would have thought that was a much later invention. Because I've had that delivered it comes on the back of a truck and looks like a jam roly poly. It does yes that's right yeah exactly and it was just sort of a steady increase from there. If you were a wealthy landowner, you had vast amounts of grass probably just because you had a large number of sheep or cows. And then bit by bit, you know, person after person thought, well, actually we could make that look a bit prettier. We could put in a walled garden, we could put some flowers around it, we could make

a little flower bed and, you know, sort of create some nice stripes with a roller on the grass and it sort of slowly became less functional and more decorative and then via as we've said capability Brown via Thomas Jefferson and so on and so on and then you sort of get to the lawns of suburbia you know the idea of the perfect house having a perfect lawn yeah and it's just your own little bit of nature your own little bit of countryside albeit very cultivated and man-made. In America they have rules in certain communities they have rules about what your front lawn should look like. Oh really? Yes it just mustn't look messy it was almost look there's the kind of like a uniformity to all the

front lawns in a suburb. Yeah and then of course various wars came along and lots of lawns were turned over into growing vegetables, fruit and vegetables, during the war effort. So an awful lot of lawns suddenly disappeared and then they sort of really came back in after the Second World War in the late 40s, early 50s. They became a luxury item again. you know, we've we've done with the hard toil of using the land to grow food Now let's just revert it back to a nice pretty lawn because we can and they've just been Sort of a status symbol of the suburban home, you know, you have this idea of the Joneses Looking over each other's garden fence to see who's got the tidier lawn. Yes.

And it's just sort of spread from there. I mean there is the tidiest lawn of all in South West 19. Oh that would be Wimbledon. That would be Wimbledon. Yes. Shall we talk about Wimbledon? Come on then. Centre Court.

Yes. So why, first of all, why do people play tennis on grass? And the reason is because you've got three different surfaces. You've got hard surfaces, clay surfaces and grass surfaces. And grass is the fastest surface. Well there's a tongue twister for you. Come on everyone join in. Grass is the fastest surface. Because the ball slips along the grass and doesn't bounce up as much as it does on

clay. Okay, yeah, I see. So it's a really quick surface. And Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam venue that has a grass court. Oh really, is it? And so they take great pride in Centre Court and the grass that goes. So the grass that goes into making Centre Court Centre Court is unique to Wimbledon. Oh is it? They have their own particular variety.

They have their own particular variety. It's a mixture of rye grass and other grasses. And what they do is every year they pick up all the grass back down to the earth. So they basically cut up all the grass that's on centric or every year back to the soil. And then they seed the soil again. So basically the grass on the centric or just only ever one year old. Wow, that's brilliant. So they grow it, they put fertilizer on it, they really take care of it and they use the highest tech stuff you can imagine to make the grass as hardy as possible. I mean, you'll notice at the end of the tournament,

there's a lot of brown where the servers are on the baseline. Yeah, the servers on the surface. Yes. But what they do at Wimbledon is they cut it to exactly a quarter of an inch all the time. So they'll even come out and cut it every night to keep it at 8mm if you want to be metric about it. So a quarter of an inch, 8mm exactly across the whole of the surface of Centre Court.

The guys who look after it are quite well paid yeah and they take their jobs very very very seriously. Yeah that's brilliant. There are a lot of words and expressions that come out of the word grass. Oh yes okay. So well let's start with the with the most obscure one first. Okay, gone aftermath aftermath So aftermath is technically math is actually Moe it's another word for mowing. Oh, is it so man? So the second crop of hay is called the aftermath. It's after you've mowed it. Yes. Oh great

So you see that then you mow it again, yeah, the second time and that's called the aftermath. Brilliant. And there there's things like day math which is the amount of land you can cut in a day, you can, okay, grass you can crop in a day. I've not heard that one. There's an under math which is if you get a in a wood you get grass underneath the trees as opposed to you know shrubbery okay so an under math is the undergrowth of grass in a wood yeah there's a French word which we now use as regain yes and regain is is again is that sort of it's re mowing us okay I mean we have some expressions of course don't we've using the word grass I'm sure we do

There's the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, which I love because it technically is yes It's about angle angle of view. It's about the angle. Yeah. Yeah as you're looking down on your own lawn You're looking from above when you're looking at the lawn in the neighbors garden You're looking more sideways and therefore you actually see more green in the vertical blades so it is actually greener. If you hopped over the fence and then look back at your own then your own grass would be greener. It's all relative. Unless you're a snake in a grass obviously. Sure yes. But then if you saw a snake in the grass you wouldn't let the grass grow under your feet would you? No you certainly wouldn't and you wouldn't let the grass grow under your feet, would you? No, you certainly wouldn't. And you wouldn't hurry to grass them up either.

Exactly. Well, grass them up is quite interesting. Grass is a Cockney rhyming slang for an informer. Right? It's short for grasshopper. So it's like, it rhymes with copper. No. Yes.

Actually, talking of grasshoppers, do you know they're older than dinosaurs? No, I didn't know that. We had grasshoppers before we had dinosaurs. Yeah Wow brilliant Then there's you know as you get older, you know, you've you've been back to your grassroots and you kind of yeah But then all that and then you may have been put out to grass Yes, of course There's also I think quite like about sort of relationships. Yeah. So there's there's a thing called a grass widow. How is there? I've not heard that.

Which is sort of somebody who's alone after a divorce or an affair. Oh okay. But there was also a thing called a green wedding dress. Right. And the idea of a green wedding dress was that you'd obviously had some sort of affair with the person that you were marrying because there were green stains. So green wedding dresses were very unpopular and probably still are because they kind of indicate that you may have had sexual relations before the ceremony. They're not quite as pure as the white ones. before the ceremony. They're not quite as pure as the white ones. So one of my favorite songs especially at karaoke is the green green grass of home. Oh yes Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones. But if you think about it it's actually an incredibly sad song. Is it? I can't quite think of the lyrics right now talk us

through it. So it's about a guy who's going home and it's like The old hometown looks the same and the family come out to meet him his Mary comes out to meet him his mother and his father But then it says then I look around and I see these four gray walls that surround me Hmm, and I'm going to be laid beneath the green green grass of home oh so it's actually a guy dreaming about what's gonna happen after he's executed at dawn oh crikey and then his body is shipped back to his hometown and his coffin is buried underneath the green green grass of home well that's a little bit maudlin isn't it? Yeah! Cranky.

But once you know that you listen to the song in a whole different vein. Yes. Up until now I just thought it was a nice tune. Yes. Oh dear. Now we mentioned bamboo in passing earlier on as a type of grass that you wouldn't think is a type of grass. Yes.

I'm not going to go too much into this because it's probably big enough to warrant its own episode actually. But bamboo grows absolutely everywhere. I think of bamboo and I think of giant pandas in China and that's it. But it grows everywhere. Malaysia, China, Japan, India, the Himalayas, Australia, Africa, South America and even some parts of North America. There are 1,400 varieties of bamboo ranging from the short skinny things that you often sort of see in a flower pot on the windowsill in the kitchen, you know,

it's just a little ornamental thing, all the way through to giant bamboo, which as you said earlier on is incredibly tall, it can grow to 46 meters in length and 36 centimeters thick. Wow. So just over a ruler thick. Yes, that's a foot. It's big. And it's one of the fastest growing plants in the world. Some varieties of bamboo can grow up to 91 centimeters per day. I think you can hear it growing. Really? Yes. That's ridiculous, isn't it? So it grows at about four centimeters-ish per hour. Because it's so fast growing, it's renewable, it's easy to grow, it doesn't take a lot of maintenance. And the thick stuff is very strong, it's quite woody, you know.

So parts of Asia use it as a building material. You know, they make buildings, they make pathways, bridges out of bamboo. And you can even sort of strip layers off it and use it for weaving. You can make baskets and hats and you can even strip it down really finely and turn the fibers into thread so you can make textiles and clothing out of bamboo.

There seems to be a popular trend for toothbrushes and pens and glasses even, you know, spectacle frames made of bamboo so it's a very versatile thing and they propagate differently whereas this was sort of the one exception to the rule that grass spreads its seed on the wind. Bamboo has these little tendrils at the root called rhizomes and these things spread through the ground travel for miles and miles potentially and then pop up somewhere else to create a new clump of bamboo. So the whole underground network of this stuff, you know, all of the different clumps are all connected together. And of course it's good for food. The giant panda eats between 12 and 38 kilos of bamboo

per day. And of course we humans use bamboo shoots in cooking. Apparently raw bamboo contains elements of cyanide. So we shouldn't eat it raw. But yeah fascinating stuff. And you can make it into underpants? Of course you can yeah. I have bamboo underpants. You have bamboo? Of course you do. That makes sense. Yes because it's a really soft material and it's very, it's better than cotton. Cause you don't use as much water to process it. Yes, okay.

And it's actually really nice and soft and it's quite strong. It's quite breathable as well, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. Bamboo is a very good material to use for making clothes. So there you go. Bruce has grass pants. Well, I could have a grass skirt.

Well, that's true. Yes. It's not much different, is it really? Although the have a grass skirt. Well that's true yes it's not much different is it really? The idea of grass skirt is quite interesting because it's not really a thing. It was introduced to Hawaii by the Gilbert Islanders. Okay. So it wasn't actually like the Hawaiian grass skirt thing. It's not really Hawaiian it's Gilbert Islands. Is it? And the idea of like the woman in the grass skirt was like used in vaudeville. Yes okay. The exotic sexual thing. Yeah. But no they didn't it didn't originate in Hawaii. Much like the Vikings with the horned helmets. Exactly. It's been attributed to them

posthumously. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So when you talked about presidents and things of growing grass or having a lawn, the reason I said George Washington was because he also grew grass. Okay. In fact, he grew a load of grass. Are we talking about a different variety of grass here? We're talking about hemp.

Right. Okay. of grass here. We're talking about hemp. Right okay. So basically for rope and for sails and for all sorts of and for clothes as well actually, the cannabis plant is very very very good for all sorts of things for health, for growth, for clothing, food for all sorts of things it's excellent and George Washington was one of the biggest farmers in America. Was he? Yeah. Really? It's about two and a half thousand years old hemp that goes back about that far. Okay. And it's a very interesting and unusual material. And we couldn't do an episode on grass without talking about... Without talking about grass. Grass. Indeed. My greatest experience of hemp is it's what Royal Mail postal sacks used to be made

out of no before they became sort of plastic key nylon II things back in the day back in the day. There are sort of ordinary grasses like the rye grass and things like that. Yeah. And then of course there's super grass. Yes. Okay. We are young.

We are free. We keep our teeth nice and clean. Yeah. Absolutely. I just thought I'd mention super grass. Fine. Because why not? So Simon, at this point in the show, we normally look at Guinness records about grass, but

I can't see how they could be any Guinness records about grass. This was a tough one because grass has a tendency to not do much. No. We've already talked about how big it is, how ubiquitous it is, what its uses are. So it basically comes down to records that people have achieved in relation to grass. Oh things like the fastest grass mower or something like that. Right that sort of thing. So I found a couple of those type of records. I found the largest area of, this is so specific, the largest area of grass mowed by a triple disc mower in an eight hour period.

grass mowed by a triple disc mower in an eight hour period. Isn't that precise? Okay. It was 141 hectares, which comes out at 348 acres in eight hours. And this was achieved by a company called Klass in America who make lawnmowers. This was achieved in July 2018 in Colorado. It sounds a bit self-serving though, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah a little bit. It was pretty much just performed in order to show how good their mowers were. Another lawnmower related record,

the farthest distance pushing a manual lawnmower in 24 hours by an individual, just over 100 miles. It was achieved by Carlos Duke in Australia in 2024. I then found the single most expensive piece of grass, which is to say that… It has to be Wimbledon surely. Close. Wembley. Oh right! So in 2000, a gentleman called Ken Bates, who was the chairman of Chelsea Football Club,

he decided to buy a piece of the playing field of Wembley Stadium just to keep at home just for his own amusement. And apparently this was the very specific piece of grass where Geoff Hurst's ball landed in the winning goal in 1966. Oh wow! So he bought this little square of grass for £20,000. Goodness, and yet the Scots go and just rip it up for free. That's economy for you. So yeah, those are my grassy records. Well, I think all of my grass- related facts have been put out to pasture. Very good. I think I've cut all mine. Well, if you've enjoyed listening to us chatting about grass, please go ahead and give us a

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