MOWED LAWN GRASSES seem oddly perverse. Their ideal state is timeless, unchanging, eternal; they grow and grow and grow and never mature. The telos, the genetically programmed desire, of plant life is to mature and reproduce itself. Nowhere in nature do grass blades grow upward to a two-inch height, and then chop themselves off, making themselves perpetually preadolescent botanical castrati. Nowhere in nature do grasses — if not interrupted by acts of God — not flower, go to seed and propagate.
The current definition of a good lawn, according to cultural historian Virginia Scott Jenkins's The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, is "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged." To maintain such a lawn demands that on a weekly basis the life cycle of lawn grasses be interrupted. Slicing off the blade's chlorophyll-rich photosynthesizing tip diminishes the grass's ability to make and store food, which in turn means fertilizer must be applied. A lawn is rather like a brain-dead ten-year-old, kept alive on an IV-drip.
In the United States, as of 1991, some 45 million home lawns, more than 50,000 square miles, about the size of the state of Illinois, were trying to go to seed and being frustrated in that attempt. Home lawns — plus parks, golf courses, and lawns surrounding public buildings and cemetery markers and separating freeways — from coast to coast have replaced forests, deserts, wetlands, and meadows with savannahs composed of turf grasses not native to America.
The grass lawn is so common a part of the American landscape that a youngster easily might believe that God seeded one after another of these sharply edged green turfs during His seven-day creation frenzy. But He didn't. According to historian Jenkins, the lawn as we know it is recent and peculiarly American.
The definition of lawn, writes Jenkins, has changed several times during the last 400 years. In the 16th Century, when Francis Bacon observed that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass finely shorn" and the lawn mower was a sheep, the word lawn, from launde or land, referred to an open space or glade in the woods. In the 17th Century a lawn was a stretch of untilled ground covered with grass; when this grass was cut, men armed with scythes did the cutting. By the 18th Century lawn had come to mean a portion of a garden or pleasure ground covered with grass and kept closely mowed.
Before the Civil War, few Americans other than the wealthy kept front lawns. Most grass growing near a house was rough pasture. Grasses indigenous to North America did not produce good lawn; they were rough after cutting and green only during the growing season. Houses in American towns tended to be built close to the street and fronted by a small fenced garden. Farm houses and out-buildings were surrounded by pasture, fields, or gardens and a packed dirt farmyard where chickens pecked at insects and the farm wife tossed the "slops," or kitchen garbage. In the South, swept dirt or sand, covered with pine straw, surrounded houses. In the Southwest, adobe houses were built around cool interior courtyards, the more luxurious of these courtyards graced by a fountain. In the 1830s an English textile engineer recognized that the machine used to shear soft nap away from carpets could be rebuilt as a machine that cut grass. The engineer fabricated a reel mower. The mower was not produced in quantity, because little demand either in England or the United States existed for it. What grass-cutting got done was still done primarily by sheep or scythesmen.
The War of Secession made us rich. When it was over there was nothing to stop progress — no classical ruins of ideas no superstitions to retard civil republican ardor. Not so much had to be destroyed or overturned as in the European cultures of Roman towns and medieval guilds. A few Dutch farms were razed, villages melded into towns, towns burned into precincts, and all at once block and tackle were raising the marble and granite mansions of Fifth Avenue. ... Almost a million people called New York home, everyone securing his needs in a state of cheerful degeneracy. Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by.
In 1868, Olmsted was commissioned to design Riverside, outside Chicago, one of America's first planned suburbias. Olmsted recommended that each house be set back a mini- mum of 30 feet from the sidewalk. In spite of the Tory Anglophilia exhibited by many among America's new monied classes and their longing to recreate in the new America the old country homes of the English aristocracy, Olmsted's design forbad high surrounding walls and hedges that surrounded these English houses. He believed these walls and hedges made city neighborhoods appear "a series of private madhouses," and further, were "selfish" and "undemocratic" features, not to be encouraged in America. The required 30 feet would be put into lawn, and each home's lawn would merge into his neighbors' lawn. These green expanses, Olmsted hoped, would create the impression that all families in these new suburbias lived together, sharing one central park.
Not everyone, of course, agreed with Olm- sted and Scott. Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class, saw the lawn as one more negative example of "conspicuous consumption." Lacy's collection offers several anti-lawn, pro-fence essays.
Jenkins notes that in the U.S. the first three patents for lawn mowers were issued in 1868. By 1881 the Patent Office had granted 138 patents for lawn mowers. In 1881, 47,661 lawn mowers were manufactured in the United States; fewer than one-half of one percent of households recorded in the 1880 census owned a mower.
Grasses that provided year-round lawn were not yet readily available. In the late 1880s, writes Jenkins, the federal government initiated a search for grass that would provide lawn in all of America's varied climates, and mail- order catalogs had begun to offer lawn-seed mixtures. The Sears, Roebuck catalog showed lawn-care equipment in its 1896 catalog. By 1900, by which time some 15 percent of the population lived in suburbs, many companies were selling grass-seed mixtures for different growing conditions.
As suburban developments proliferated, the front lawn that had been a luxury of the wealthy became a status symbol for the middle class. How important the appearance of these lawns were can be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway has rented a small house near Jay Gatsby's estate on the fictional West Egg, Long Island. Carraway has not attended properly to his lawn. In Chapter Five, Gatsby, visiting Carraway, gazes across Carraway's unmown grass and then offers to send his yardman to mow Carraway's lengthy grass.
"I want to get the grass cut," he said. We both looked at the grass — there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began.
Between 1930 and World War II's end, new housing starts lapsed and few new lawns were put in. Using magazine articles and advertisements, Jenkins shows that despite the building slump, the lawn industry managed to hold on through the Depression and war by selling their products to homeowners with established lawns and to federal, state, and local governments for public projects. The Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps built parks and playgrounds, surrounding them with new turf.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, grass seed, fertilizers, lawn mowers, gasoline, and rubber hoses were difficult for civilians to acquire. But these materials were available to the federal government, writes Jenkins, adding that during the war years the government expanded lawn building and care, seeding in new lawns around munitions factories, shell-loading plants, housing projects, and military bases.
With World War II's end, writes Jenkins, the third and by far most widespread suburban development began. This development was financed by the federal government through Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration loans for mortgages and by government funding for highways. Builders like William Levitt, who raised 17,000 homes in his Levittown, Long Island, subdivision, drew on a tradition of upper-middle-class suburban development and furnished their blue-collar tract housing with lawns.
By 1946, imported and hybrid grasses, new chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides (many formulated by the War Department), lawn mowers, and lawn tools were soon on sale again to civilians. Jenkins notes that in 1941 Americans spent $5 million on power lawn mowers; in 1950, Americans spent $100 million on power lawn mowers. By 1960 the nearly 30 million home lawns in the United States were being added to at the rate of almost half a million a year, and the average American lawn covered about 1/13 of an acre.
The good lawn, however, has its price. Now, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans dribble and spray some 70 million pounds of chemicals onto lawns each year. Again, according to the EPA, acre for acre, the American lawn receives four times as much chemical pesticide as the average U.S. farmland, with homeowners using higher concentrations of these chemicals than do most commercial farmers.
Jenkins doesn't believe that the front lawn as we know it is here to stay. She cites a 1991 New York Times Op-Ed piece by Michael Pollan, Harper's magazine editor and author of Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. Pollan chided then- President George Bush, who'd put himself forward as the "environmental President," for not doing more to earn that distinction. Pollan proposed that President Bush issue an executive order to the Park Service to rip out the White House lawn. Pollan suggested that the lawn be replaced by meadow, wetland (the White House grounds' original habitat), a vegetable garden managed according to organic principles that could supply food for Washington's poor, or an orchard of apple trees, underplanted with meadow grasses.
"A new landscape aesthetic is a cultural creation," Jenkins concludes, "and it remains to be seen whether the environmental movement in this country can enlist as potent a group of supporters for the 21st Century as the lawn industry, the U.S. Golf Association, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture did during the 20th Century.