Coming to terms with the front lawn from hell

Coming to terms with the front lawn from hell

Photo by Rémi Müller on Unsplash

Originally published 23 May 1994

It’s that time of the year and the crab­grass is waiting.

If there is an after­life, and I end up you-know-where, the one thing I’m sure I’ll find is a lawn.

Not flames. Not red hot coals. Just a greensward stretch­ing away to the hori­zon. An end­less expanse of turf, choked with crab­grass and dan­de­lions — and it’s my job to put it right.

Not dev­ils with pitch­forks, but dev­ils with pow­er mow­ers that fail to start, green plas­tic bags of clip­pings that burst their seams, leaf rakes that have lost their tines.

Perdi­tion is an eter­nal Sat­ur­day morn­ing tend­ing grass.

Don’t get me wrong, I have lit­tle to com­plain about. The lawn assigned to my care is not much big­ger than a liv­ing room car­pet. But it’s big enough for me to know that a bil­liard-table smooth, lus­trous­ly green, uni­form­ly mowed, weed­less lawn was nev­er meant for the neigh­bor­hoods of Paradise.

How did Amer­i­cans get so hung up on the dia­bol­i­cal abom­i­na­tion called a lawn?

The mowed lawn is as unique­ly Amer­i­can as soft­ball, lemon­ade, and the Fourth of July. No oth­er peo­ple on Earth have wished to sur­round them­selves with a hair-shirt of grass, unless it is the British upper class, for whom an expanse of well-kept lawn is the botan­i­cal equiv­a­lent of look­ing down one’s nose at the neighbors.

The first mechan­i­cal lawn mow­er was invent­ed by an Eng­lish­man, appro­pri­ate­ly named Edwin Bud­ding, in 1830. “Coun­try gen­tle­men will find in using my machine an amus­ing, use­ful, and health­ful exer­cise,” he wrote in his patent appli­ca­tion. Pre­sum­ably, most coun­try gen­tle­man hired some­one from the low­er class­es to push the damn thing around.

For Amer­i­cans, the lawn is a state­ment of rugged indi­vid­u­al­ism and mid­dle-class ascen­dan­cy. No need for a town com­mon, vil­lage green, or pub­lic park: Every Amer­i­can wish­es to pos­sess his own piece of green, unshared with neigh­bors, unvi­o­lat­ed even by the neigh­bor’s dog. Most aston­ish­ing­ly, Amer­i­cans have insist­ed on tak­ing this inven­tion of moist, mild Eng­land to every region of our con­ti­nent, includ­ing the frozen wastes of North Dako­ta, the trop­ics of South Flori­da, and the deserts of Nevada.

Yale Uni­ver­si­ty hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ists F. Her­bert Bor­mann, Diana Bal­mori, and Gor­don T. Geballe tell the sto­ry of Amer­i­ca’s love affair with lawns in Redesign­ing the Amer­i­can Lawn: A Search for Envi­ron­men­tal Har­mo­ny, pub­lished [in 1993] by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. It is a sto­ry of seduc­tion, debase­ment, and final damna­tion to a hell of wast­ed water, chem­i­cal her­bi­cides, clip­pers, chip­pers, trim­mers, and mow­ers. Add, too, the infer­nal grind of inter­nal com­bus­tion engines dis­turb­ing the peace of week­end mornings.

Bor­mann et al make a dis­tinc­tion between what they call the “Free­dom Lawn” and the “Indus­tri­al Lawn.”

The Free­dom Lawn con­tains plants oth­er than tra­di­tion­al lawn grass­es such as rye grass and fes­cue. The seeds of dan­de­lions, vio­lets, bluets, spurrey, brown-eyed Susan, and oth­er so-called weeds all allowed to take root, along with non-stan­dard grass­es such as quack grass, tim­o­thy, and crab­grass. All these co-exist quite nice­ly, and the home­own­er is required only to give them an occa­sion­al mow.

The mix of plants in a Free­dom Lawn is deter­mined by the inter­ac­tion between mow­ing and local ecol­o­gy. The plants suc­ceed with­out arti­fi­cial inter­ven­tion, and they tol­er­ate a lot of stress. If the lawn goes brown for lack of water, well, one sim­ply waits for reviv­ing rain.

The Indus­tri­al Lawn, on the oth­er hand, is com­posed exclu­sive­ly of a few reg­u­la­tion grass species pur­chased at a lawn sup­ply store. It is free of weeds and pests, mowed to a low, even height, and con­tin­u­ous­ly green. It ignores local ecol­o­gy and species diver­si­ty, and sub­sti­tutes tech­nol­o­gy for nat­ur­al processes.

Our authors say this of the Indus­tri­al Lawn: “It has the added virtue, at least in terms of the lawn care indus­try, of nev­er being com­plete­ly attain­able. There is always some new and nec­es­sary bit of tech­nol­o­gy, some new find­ing on fer­til­iz­ers, some mod­i­fi­ca­tion of pes­ti­cides or new vari­ety of grass required to move toward the ide­al, or, in more com­pet­i­tive terms, to keep up with the neighbors.”

How did such a pow­er­ful ide­al arise? The $25 bil­lion-a-year turf-grass indus­try has exploit­ed Amer­i­ca’s para­dox­i­cal long­ing to be sep­a­rate while wish­ing to fit in. We sur­round our­selves with a patch of per­son­al turf, but do not want to appear dif­fer­ent from our neigh­bors. The costs of an Indus­tri­al Lawn to the envi­ron­ment are for­got­ten in the race to have the most Astro-turfy yard on the block.

Any­one who feels afflict­ed by a lawn would do well to peruse the lit­tle book by Bor­mann, Bal­mori, and Geballe. It is handy to know why we want what we want, and the costs — to our­selves and the envi­ron­ment — of hav­ing it. The book is not a polemic. It lays out the pros and cons of var­i­ous lawn care strate­gies, and even gives advice on how to cre­ate a good Indus­tri­al Lawn.

For myself, I’ve decid­ed to let the crab­grass, plan­tain, and clover thrive, but hold the line on the dan­de­lions. Not yet per­fect Free­dom, but at least a few Dan­tesque cir­cles up from lawn hell to lawn purgatory.

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