Hazelwood Crown Green Bowls Club Celebrates 40 Years of Bowling Heritage with Trusted Dennis FT Range Machinery
For almost four decades Hazelwood Crown Green Bowls Club, situated around two miles outside Belper, Derbyshire has been providing bowlers with one of the finest playing surfaces in the area - a green built on community spirit, volunteer dedication and a long-standing trust in Dennis turf machinery.
At the heart of the club’s success is greenkeeper Leslie Hardy, who has overseen the maintenance of the green for more than 30 years and has helped establish a reputation for exceptional playing conditions across the county.
Reflecting on the club’s origins, Leslie paid tribute to the vision and determination that created the green 40 years ago.
“We are grateful for a lady called Ann Bowler who, 40 years ago, decided she wanted a bowling green here,” said Leslie. “With a lot of locals and farmers helping, they made this marvellous green for us.”
From those humble beginnings, the club has grown into a thriving bowls community with around 50 members, all passionate about preserving the standards and traditions that make the club special.
A key part of maintaining those standards has been the club’s long-standing use of Dennis machinery - particularly the versatile and highly respected Dennis FT Range interchangeable cassette mower system.
“We chose Dennis because we knew the Howard family and that was why we first picked Dennis,” Leslie explained. “But these machines have proved themselves year after year. They are very reliable.”
The club currently operates multiple Dennis machines, including the FT510 and FT610 models, which play a vital role in maintaining the bowling surface throughout the year.
“The FT510 is our main mowing machine,” Leslie said. “We cut the lawn three times a week and mow down to four millimetres to create an excellent surface.”
Powered by reliable Honda engines and designed specifically for professional fine turf maintenance, the Dennis FT Range has become one of the most trusted systems in bowls, cricket, croquet, tennis and golf environments throughout the UK. Available in 17”, 20” and 24” cutting widths, the machines are engineered to deliver precision performance while remaining easy to operate and maintain.
The interchangeable cassette system is one of the features Leslie values most. “All these machines have cassettes with them and you can do lots of jobs,” he explained. “You could do all the jobs on the bowling green with one machine using different cassettes.”
The FT Range supports 12 interchangeable cassette options, including scarifiers, verti-cutters, brushes, spikers, slitters and cutting cylinders, enabling grounds teams to carry out a full range of essential turf maintenance tasks with a single power unit. Cassettes can be changed in as little as 15 to 30 seconds, reducing downtime and increasing efficiency.
At Hazelwood, the FT610 is used primarily for verticutting — an essential process for improving green speed and surface quality.’’ We find this very useful for verticutting because it’s a nice wide machine and we can travel slowly with it to do a better job.”
Leslie explained that verticutting is critical to producing the high-quality playing surface bowlers expect.
“I’ve known for a good while now that the bowls run better when the grass is sticking straight up,” he said. “So we verticut to cut the laterals out and make the playing surface quicker.”
Unlike fixed maintenance schedules, Leslie prefers a practical, observational approach to turf care.
“As far as verticutting goes, I walk over the green and do it when I think it’s necessary,” he explained. “There’s no fixed time for us. It’s all down to looking at the green and doing what it needs.”
The precision engineering of the FT Range helps support that attention to detail. Features such as the simple click height adjustment system allow operators to make adjustments in 0.25mm increments without tools, while the spring steel comb helps tease up lateral growth prior to cutting, improving cut quality and presentation.
“Setting up for different cutting depths only takes a few minutes using the setting bar,” said Leslie. “It’s very important that we have a good cut quality to keep the grasses down to the level we want, whether that’s mowing or verticutting.”
The club’s maintenance programme is made possible not just by quality equipment, but also by the dedication of volunteers who share responsibility for the green.
“We are very lucky at this club,” Leslie said. “I don’t have to do all the work myself. We have at least six volunteers and it makes the job easy.”
Rather than relying on one person, mowing duties rotate weekly among volunteers.
“One person has it for a week and then another person has it for a week,” Leslie explained. “We don’t make one person work too hard. I think it’s a very good thing to have a pool of workers to do these jobs- we're not geting any younger.”
The results of their hard work have not gone unnoticed. During a recent county match weekend, visiting players praised the quality and pace of the playing surface.
“All the players said they wished they could play on this green all the time,” Leslie said. “That is testament to the quality of the machines that we use to keep it like this.”
Durability and reliability have also been central to the club’s experience with Dennis machinery. One of the club’s older Dennis machines is believed to be around 40 years old and remains on site as a dependable backup mower.
“We believe this machine is about 40 years old,” Leslie said. “Now we mainly keep it as a backup machine if something goes wrong with one of the others, which is very rare.”
That reliability, Leslie says, comes from both the quality of the machinery and the care taken during winter servicing.
“We look after them in the out of season winter period,” he explained. “We get the mowing cassettes professionally sharpened and then two of us here check all the bearings to make sure they are running nicely.”
The club also carries out preventative maintenance on rollers, ratchets and moving components to ensure smooth operation throughout the playing season.
“We test all the bearings and make sure everything is right so we can go through the season without any problems,” Leslie added.
After nearly three decades of continuous use, Leslie remains convinced the Dennis FT Range is one of the best investments a bowls club can make.
“These machines have been with us now for near 30 years,” he said. “They’re so well made that you can depend on them. We have no trouble during the season from them.”
And when speaking to fellow greenkeepers during matches around the county, Leslie is always quick to recommend the brand.
“When I’m talking to other greenkeepers, I always say that we have the Dennis mowers which are very reliable,” he said. “Certainly, if you purchase one of these, you know that it’s there for about 30 years.”
Forty years after local farmers and volunteers first created the green, Hazelwood Crown Green Bowls Club continues to thrive — combining traditional community values with modern fine turf maintenance practices to produce a surface admired by players across the county.