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(repost)
And the green grass grew all around....
So goes the old folk song, anyway. Except for Colorado and New Mexico we've had the green grass, too. And the green weeds flourishing like the bay tree of scripture. Wherever we live, the weeds grow, and I generally like it that way because I like wildflowers, and wild flowers do not do well where they get mowed down every couple of weeks. But wherever we've lived we've been the odd folks out for my preferences for the wile and unkempt (albeit floral).
I guess we were both behind and ahead of the times.
In 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing published the first landscape-gardening book aimed at an American audience. At the time, Downing was twenty-five years old and living in Newburgh, New York. He owned a nursery, which he had inherited from his father, and for several years had been publishing loftily titled articles, such as “Remarks on the Duration of the Improved Varieties of New York Fruit Trees,” in horticultural magazines. Downing was dismayed by what he saw as the general slovenliness of rural America, where pigs and poultry were allowed to roam free, “bare and bald” houses were thrown up, and trees were planted haphazardly, if at all. (The first practice, he complained, contributed to the generally “brutal aspect of the streets.”) His “Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening” urged readers to improve themselves by improving their front yards. “In the landscape garden we appeal to that sense of the Beautiful and the Perfect, which is one of the highest attributes of our nature,” it declared.
He promoted the green and velvety lawn, and the public promoted his book, and a new lawn-cutter was developed, and over the years we got where we are today- where you are a bad neighbor if your lawn is not a velvety expanse of weed free grass, neatly clipped and trimmed.
We spend some forty billion dollars a year on grass- the legal sort. That includes seed, equipment, and poisons- lots of poisons. While we think of the velvety expanse of grass as a pleasant place for children to play- and I admit cool green grass does feel nice beneath bare feet, most suburban lawns hide lurking dangers- chemicals that run off into our water.
Yet not to have such a lawn is viewed as un-neighborly, anti-social, slovenly, even.
The lawn has become so much a part of the suburban landscape that it is difficult to see it as something that had to be invented.
A lawn is a symbol, a way to communicate something in our culture.
A lawn may be pleasing to look at, or provide the children with a place to play, or offer the dog room to relieve himself, but it has no productive value. The only work it does is cultural. In Downing’s day, the servant-mowed lawn stood, eloquently, for the power structure that made it possible: who but the very rich could afford such a pointless luxury? As mechanical mowers enabled middle-class suburbanites to cut their own grass, this meaning was lost and a different one took hold. A lawn came to signal its owner’s commitment to a communitarian project: the upkeep of the greensward that linked one yard to the next.
“A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors, as desirable citizens,” Abraham Levitt wrote. (By covenant, the original Levittowners agreed to mow their lawns once a week between April 15th and November 15th.) “The appearance of a lawn bespeaks the personal values of the resident,” a group called the Lawn Institute declared. “Some feel that a person who keeps the lawn perfectly clipped is a person who can be trusted.”
Several different writers have addressed the lawn culture adn offered solutions. The real problem with the grassy lawn, besides the trouble it takes, is that it's another monoculture. And variety is the spice of life:
Over the years, many alternatives to the lawn have been proposed. Pollan, in his book “Second Nature” (1991), suggests replacing parts—or all—of the lawn with garden. In “Noah’s Garden” (1993), Sara Stein, by contrast, advocates “ungardening”—essentially allowing the grass to revert to thicket. Sally and Andy Wasowski, in their “Requiem for a Lawnmower” (2004), recommend filling the yard with native trees and wildflowers. For those who don’t want to give up the look or the playing space provided by a lawn, the Wasowskis suggest using Buffalo grass, one of the very few turf species native to North America. Smaller American Lawns Today, or SALT, is a concept developed by William Niering, who for many years was a professor of botany at Connecticut College. Niering planted trees around his property, then left most of the rest of his yard unmowed, to become a meadow. “The meadow can take as much of your remaining lawn as you want,” he observes in an essay posted on SALT’s Web site. “There are some people who prefer no lawn, which is ideal!” For the past few decades, David Benner, a horticulturist from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, has been touting moss as an alternative to grass: he himself has a one-acre “moss garden.” Recently, there have been several calls to make the lawnspace productive. In “Food Not Lawns” (2006), Heather C. Flores argues that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. (If you live in an urban area and don’t have a lawn, she suggests digging up your driveway.) “Edible Estates” (2008) is the chronicle of a project by Fritz Haeg, an architect and artist, who rips up conventional front yards in order to replace them with visually striking “edible plantings.” Haeg calls his approach “full-frontal gardening.”
Not all places and spaces will yield the same results, of course. I don't think we could have grown any fruits and veggies in our Colorado yard- it was dry, brown, and sandy. We did get some pretty wildflowers, however.
The Northeast is one of the relatively few regions in the country that are actually well suited to lawns. There, the simplest alternative to the modern, industrialized lawn may be a lawn that functions more or less as it did in the eighteen-forties, before herbicides or even sprinklers had been invented. In “Redesigning the American Lawn” (1993), F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Geballe dub such a lawn the Freedom Lawn. The Freedom Lawn consists of grass mixed with whatever else happens to seed itself, which, the authors note, might include:
dandelion, violets, bluets, spurrey, chickweed, chrysanthemum, brown-eyed Susan, partridge berry, Canada mayflower, various clovers, plantains, evening primrose, rushes, and wood rush, as well as grasses not usually associated with the well-manicured lawn, such as broomsedge, sweet vernal grass, timothy, quack grass, oat grass, crabgrass, and foxtail grass.
The Freedom Lawn is still mowed—preferably with a push-mower—but it is watered infrequently, if at all, and receives no chemical “inputs.” If a brown spot develops, it is likely soon to be filled by what some might call weeds, but which Bormann, Balmori, and Geballe would rather refer to as “low growing broad-leaved plants.”
That list of plants sounds charming to me.
Here all this time I thought we were just, um, relaxed, and it turns out we were part of a bono-fide political, cultural, environmental movement- the anti-lawn movement, the freedom lawn brigade.
It has a much nicer ring to it than lazy.=)
