Coming to terms with the front lawn from hell

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.