If you've known me for any amount of time, and the subject of landscaping and lawn care has come up, you've probably heard me rail against lawns. I'd like to take a moment here to elaborate on my reasons why.
A big part of it has to do with sustainability, especially when it comes to maintaining a lawn up to the weed-free, short-length, green-all-year-round standards that most Americans have been conditioned to strive for. It requires constant mowing (and the energy consumption -- usually gas -- that goes along with it), fertilizing, weed removal (which often means regular application of herbicides and pesticides), and of course watering to get that lawn as close to golf-course perfect as you can. As time goes on, water scarcity is going to become an even bigger issue than it already is, and as the climate changes, we'll all need to question our priorities when using these finite resources.
Another reason is that I'm tired of this monotonous, wasteful work -- physically as well as psychologically. In the beginning of my horticulture career, I worked for a landscape maintenance company to gain experience in the field, and the majority of the job became a tiresome repetition of mow, edge, blow, and then drive to the next account as quickly as possible. Lifting and operating heavy machines, consuming gallons of gas between the equipment and the commutes, creating all that noise, obsessively trying to blow every speck of debris off the hardscapes.... I hated it. Lawn care was never work that I felt proud of. I felt the wastefulness of the whole labor-intensive routine that we repeated from week to week, and it all seemed so pointless. Now that I'm a homeowner, I have no desire to continue that drudgery on my own property.
Personally, I feel that there are better uses for the space. I want to grow food and raise chickens, along with some ornamental garden beds that have well-placed, drought-tolerant plants that serve other ecological functions, such as encouraging pollinators. As much as possible, I want to employ permaculture principles to my landscape choices to maximize the benefits of the land while also working in harmony with nature as much as possible.
The growing obsession with the lawn went hand in hand with the rise of the suburban American Dream, which took off during the mass-produced housing developments of Abraham Levitt and his sons. The Levitts carefully manufactured their communities, constructing houses in an assembly line fashion to optimize production and lower costs. The design of these homes, yards, and community layouts was all tightly controlled in a picture-perfect little utopia, complete with strict rules about the appearance of these homogeneous properties. These towns, with their uniformly constructed houses and manicured lawns, seemed to be the epitome of postwar success in America... but they were also steeped in the prejudice that has been such a large part of American history. The Levitts were known racists, only selling homes to "members of the Caucasian race" and actively promoting segregation. They weren't subtle about their prejudice.
Bringing up the Levitts might seem like a detour, but those manufactured neighborhoods from the 1940s and onward have undeniably become the stock image of what the ideal American property is supposed to look like. It's a powerful symbol... and it comes with a lot of baggage. The immaculate lawn is a part of it. Especially when you understand how businesses like Scotts Company were promoting ever more obsessive trends in lawn care in order to sell their products and services. The marketing propaganda was so pervasive and influential that it set the standard for our societal norms. In most homeowners' minds, a manicured lawn is such an obvious default setting for their yard that they don't even question why they think that way.
Like I said, it's an interesting history, in that annoyed-our-society-has-been-duped sort of way. Ted Steinberg's book says everything about the subject that I want to express, and his writing is more entertaining than mine. I highly recommend checking it out. If you'd prefer something shorter, Freakonomics Radio made a podcast called "How Stupid Is Our Obsession With Lawns?" which includes an interview with Steinberg.
I'll wrap this up with some words from Michael Pollan, who has a beautifully written article -- Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns -- that blends rationality with poetry. He describes his changing relationship with the lawn, and like so much of his writing, the story really hits home:
The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn's relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one's neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower's brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture's boot.
Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.
Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
And just where was my lawn, anyway? The answer’s not as obvious as it seems. Gardening, I had come to appreciate, is a painstaking exploration of place; everything that happens in my garden -- the thriving and dying of particular plants, the maraudings of various insects and other pests -- teaches me to know this patch of land intimately, its geology and microclimate, the particular ecology of its local weeds and animals and insects. My garden prospers to the extent I grasp these particularities and adapt to them.
Lawns work on the opposite principle. They depend for their success on the overcoming of local conditions. Like Jefferson superimposing one great grid over the infinitely various topography of the Northwest Territory, we superimpose our lawns on the land. And since the geography and climate of much of this country is poorly suited to turfgrasses (none of which are native), this can’t be accomplished without the tools of 20th-century industrial civilization -- its chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and machinery. For we won’t settle for the lawn that will grow here; we want the one that grows there, that dense springy supergreen and weed-free carpet, that Platonic ideal of a lawn we glimpse in the ChemLawn commercials, the magazine spreads, the kitschy sitcom yards, the sublime links and pristine diamonds. Our lawns exist less here than there; they drink from the national stream of images, lift our gaze from the real places we live and fix it on unreal places elsewhere. Lawns are a form of television.
I think a big part of the debate on lawns really ought to be centered on carefully defined reasons FOR lawns and contrast that with all the different things people COULD be getting from their yard instead (and how some of them take less time and money than lawns). There are a bazillion different things that can be done with a good lawn, but this doesn't really explain why Americans surround their buildings with huge lawns on all sides to the near exclusion of any other kind of landscaping, does it? The lawn is here to stay, but people would be happier if their lawn was smaller and easier to maintain. And the idea could be quite an infectious counter-agent to the cultural brainwashing "...and over here is our lawn: big enough for a slip and slide or a little soccer practice, no weird edges; I can mow it in 5 minutes and trim once a year." The lawnless yard is a much harder sell.
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