Most people looking at the terrace lawn below the main
house at Chanticleer would simply see grass. Maybe, if it was the beginning
of the week, grass that needed a bit of a trim.
But when Bryan Christ gazes at that same terrace, he sees
an untouched canvas. For Christ, a groundskeeper at the public pleasure
garden in Wayne, doesn’t just cut the grass. He etches patterns
into the lawn with his two-cycle Toro rotary push mower, practicing
an art form as ephemeral as a sunset.
He doesn’t spend a lot of time in advance thinking about what
he’s going to do. Patterns seem to suggest themselves, he says
one blazingly hot summer afternoon as he contemplates a large rectangle
of grass with quarter-circle cutouts at each corner that’s informally
known as the croquet lawn.
This day, he starts by cutting a circle in the middle
of the rectangle, then cuts a wide arc from one bottom corner to the
other, skimming along the top edge of the central circle as he goes.
Then he cuts a matching arc from one top corner to the other, which
makes the circle in the middle look a bit like the CBS “eye”
logo. As he continues cutting arcs on alternate sides of this center
eye, each one is exactly parallel to the one before it.
“Oh, that’s cool!” says a boy who walks past with
his family as Christ executes the pattern without the slightest hint
of a waver in any of the grassy lines. As he mows in one direction,
the grass he cuts leans slightly that way; as he cuts the next arc on
his return swath, the grass bends in the opposite direction, creating
an illusion of texture and color in the design.
A while later, the youth and his family stroll by again, to see how
the grass painting is going. “We don’t have anything like
that in Omaha,” the boy tells his mother.
Until fairly recently, they didn’t at Chanticleer, either.
Performance art in the garden
“The lawns used to be straight and formal,” says Christ,
27, who worked part-time at Chanticleer when he was a student at Temple
University, and then returned to the garden a few years ago as a full-time
member of the grounds crew with a special interest in turf.
He
learned a thing or two about turf as a teenager in Littlestown, in south-central
Pennsylvania, because he spent his after-school time as a “cart
boy” at the local golf course, where his father worked. But the
inspiration for his turf tapestries came just a couple of years ago,
when Christ, who’s passionate about sports, went to see the British
soccer team Manchester United play at The Linc in South Philadelphia.
“I really liked these patterns they did on the field,” he
recalls. So he started experimenting with lawn designs at Chanticleer,
gradually adding a bit more and a bit more, until it became a kind of
performance art in a garden known for its artistry.
A love of the arts – and Rugby
It was probably inevitable that Christ would put an artistic
spin on cutting the grass. Not only does he have a degree in film from
Temple, but he has been interested in the performing arts since high
school, where he sang in musicals like Pippin, The King and I, Fiddler
on the Roof, and Brigadoon, and did audio-visual work for school shows.
He once thought about a career in theater, but concluded that was a
tough way to make a living. So he opted instead to study architectural
engineering at Penn State Fayette, and hooked up with a variety of bands
that performed all kinds of music, from straight country to heavy metal.
Christ played bass guitar and drums in addition to singing – “or
trying to, anyway,” he says, and grins.
It was at Penn State that he first encountered one of the great loves
of his life: Rugby Union football.
“I’ve played sports my whole life,” he says, from
wrestling, which he started when he was five, to baseball, American
football, and even pole vaulting. “But when I started playing
Rugby, that was it.” Every Saturday, he plays with Media Rugby
Club, and every year goes to the Can-Am RugbyTournament in New York’s
Adirondacks, where more than 100 teams compete in one of the largest
Rugby events in the world.
He’d like to play even more, with teams all over the world, “but
I have this great job,” he says.
The path to Chanticleer
Oddly enough, it was Rugby that led him to Chanticleer.
After getting his associate’s degree from Penn State, Christ switched
to Temple University to study film in the fall of 1999. But he found
it hard to find Rugby Union players on the Philadelphia campus, so when
he heard about some students who were trying to revive the languishing
Temple Men’s Rugby Football Club, he jumped at the chance to join
them. Among the students was a gifted player named Ian Hincken, whose
father, Ed Hincken, is also a Rugby enthusiast and coach. Under the
senior Hincken’s tutelage, the team reached D-1 standing –
the highest level of men’s college play in the country –
in just a couple of years.
Ed Hincken is also buildings manager at Chanticleer. So, when the garden’s
grounds manager, Peter Brindle, was looking for a summer worker, Hincken
connected him with Christ. It would be a few more years, though, before
the young Rugby player joined Brindle’s crew full-time.
“I wanted to be a Steadicam operator,” says Christ, referring
to the camera-stabilizing device that won an Oscar for its Philadelphia
inventor because it revolutionized the way movies are shot. After graduation,
he took a job with a Doylestown company that makes industrial films,
with the lure of shooting and editing film. Instead, he found himself
managing the office more often than shooting on location, so in 2003
he took the opportunity to return to Chanticleer.
The new job tapped into some of his other skills, too. Christ soon became
the computer-savvy IT man on staff, and he also handles any video and
sound recording that is done in-house. And his familiarity with CAD
technology (that’s computer aided design) came in handy in 2005
when he helped Hincken modify architectural plans for the garden’s
new pavilion in the Asian Woods.
But in summer, he’s mostly outdoors with the turf.
What inspires those designs?
“We’ve increased our mowing heights by 1-1/2 inches over
last year,” Christ says, as he takes a break from creating the
design that his colleague Fran DiMarco has dubbed “The Linc.”
Leaving the grass longer helps control weeds and prevent burnout, he
adds, as well as conserving some moisture. “And I’ve noticed
its springier this year, as a result.”
Height can be part of his designs, too. In one pattern, he mows three
rows at one height, the next row at a higher level, then three rows
at the original height, and two at the higher level, and so on. Or he
may take his inspiration from a garden feature. A pool, for instance,
may trigger a wave design, or maybe concentric circles to imitate the
ripple effect of a pebble dropped in water.
Christ is responsible for the lawns on the terraces, near the courtyard
at the entrance, the “postage stamp” below the teacup garden,
and the greensward between the tennis court and vegetable gardens. But
his approach is the same when he mows larger expanses on a Toro Z ride-on
mower.
When he mowed Chanticleer’s grassy hillside, he says, “I
used hedges and other landmarks to eyeball the lines of the pattern.
You just make sure the wheel of the mower aligns on the previous cut.”
He used the big Toro to paint lines across the hillside to draw visitors’
attention to different features of the garden – point them up
the hill towards the ruin garden, perhaps.
Like several other Chanticleer staffers, Christ lives on the job. Earlier
this year, he moved from Conshohocken to an apartment that was once
part of the servants’ quarters on the former estate.
“I love being here,” he says. “Whenever I get bored,
I just come and work. It’s really convenient.”
–oo0oo–
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