The green · Rink 4
Reading a slow park green in the first weeks of the season
The green opens in the second half of April, and for the first few weeks it plays nothing like it will in July. Every year we have to learn it again, and every year somebody says they have never known it this slow, which is exactly what they said the year before.
- Written
- 19 April 2025
- Looked over
- 24 May 2025
- Reading
- 8 minutes
- Ends
- 4
- Green
- South London
A green that has spent the winter as a lawn
Ours is a council green in a park in south London, a flat square of fine grass a little under forty metres a side, with a shallow ditch round the edge and a low bank beyond it. Over the winter it is left alone apart from the odd cut and the autumn work. By April the grass is lush and a touch long, the ground underneath is still soft from the rain, and a bowl delivered with the weight you would use in August stops a good three or four metres short of the jack. That is the whole problem of the first weeks: the green is heavy, and it takes a while to trust how firmly you have to bowl.
It is uneven, too, in ways that disappear later. The corner nearest the pavilion stays damp longest because the hedge shades it until after eleven, and that end of the first rink plays slower than the far side of the same rink until well into May. The groundsman, who looks after this green and two others, cuts it a little lower each week as the weather warms, and the pace creeps up with every cut. We write the date of each cut on the board in the pavilion when we see him, which is not always.
Timing a bowl instead of guessing
Green speed is measured in seconds. You deliver a bowl to a jack at about twenty-seven metres and time it from the moment it leaves the hand to the moment it stops. A slow green in April might give ten or eleven seconds; a fast one in a dry August, fourteen or fifteen. The part that confuses newcomers is that the higher number is the faster green. On quick grass a bowl needs less push, so it travels more slowly and for longer, and takes a wider curve on the way.
One of us, a retired science teacher who takes these things seriously, keeps a record of our timings through the season with the stopwatch on his phone and an exercise book. His figures for last year run from ten and a half seconds on the first Saturday to thirteen and a half in mid-July, falling back towards twelve in September once the dew starts lying on the grass in the mornings. I have no idea whether that is typical of a park green. It is typical of ours, and knowing it has settled a good many arguments.
Chalked up in the pavilion
- Time from release to stop, with the jack at roughly full length
- Bowl three or four and take the middle time, not the best one
- Time both hands, since forehand and backhand can differ on the same rink
- Note the time of day, because morning dew slows everything down
The run of each rink
No green is perfectly level, and a council green that has been played on for decades has habits of its own. On ours, bowls on the fourth rink drift towards the ditch on the backhand more than the bias alone accounts for, because that side of the green falls very slightly towards the path. The second rink has a patch about two thirds of the way down where a forehand bowl sometimes holds its line longer than it should, and nobody has been able to tell me why. We call it the shelf, for no particular reason, and newcomers learn to aim a little wider on that hand.
The only way to learn these things is to play the same rink for a while and notice where your bowls finish compared with where you expected them to. I keep a rough plan of the green on the back of the scorecard, and at the end of a session I mark any bowl that did something surprising. Over three seasons the marks have gathered into a sort of map, and the map mostly agrees with what the longer-standing players knew without drawing anything at all.
What we do differently in April
Early in the season we set the jack shorter, around twenty-five metres rather than full length, because on a heavy green the full length is hard work for the older players and for anyone whose shoulder is still stiff from the winter. We play fewer ends and stop for tea sooner. We also try not to judge anyone's game in April. A player who looks lost on a slow green is often the one who comes into their own in July, when a lighter touch starts to pay.
The other habit is to walk the green before we start. Two or three of us go up and down each rink we are using, looking for worm casts, fallen twigs and the odd crisp packet blown over from the playground, and pick them off by hand. A worm cast in the wrong place can knock a bowl off line by a surprising distance on soft spring grass, and clearing the rink is easier than arguing afterwards about whether it was the cast or the bowler.
Chalked up in the pavilion
- A shorter jack for the first four or five weeks
- Walk each rink and clear casts and litter before the first end
- Finish earlier, since the green and the players are both out of practice
- Write the timings on the board so the next group can see them
Written by one of the group and read over by the others after a session. Last changed 24 May 2025.Back to the score sheet