Vintage Horticultural and Garden Machinery Club

Occasionally weird and wonderful machines turn up. But are they serious ideas, homemade affairs or ideas destined to be recycled for decades? Read on to find out about one.

Whether they work or not one definitely homemade machine which everyone seems to be aware of is the bicycle lawnmower. The image on the right is one that we found in the photo galleries archive.

Having seen a brochure image here we’ve worked out that the mower is probably a 1960/70s Qualcast E.1 with a 12″ cut, we don’t know what the bike is.  

However, to usurp the 1970’s bicycle mower by the best part of a century, we found (image below) in the pages of an 1888 newspaper a reference to ‘A Bicycle Lawn Mower‘ exhibited at the New York State Fair. Although of a more precarious nature it came from the ‘suggestion of a young man who attached an ordinary hand-mower to the hind wheel and frame of an ordinary bicycle‘. 

It would seem that some ideas neither go out of fashion nor become successful.