How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America?
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I definitely like lawns - they're great for running about on, playing games, having a picnic. But other vegetation is nice too. The beauty of a slightly wild garden is the abundance of nature - insects, birds, the scent of flowers. Lawns are a monoculture with none of that.
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My sister & BiL visted from out of state last week and they were like "why does everyone let their lawns die here?" and I actually hadn't even thought about it much before - the fish doesn't see the water, I guess. I think it's because it's going to cost a lot if you want to keep your lawn green through the summer - mostly sewer costs as they're based on water usage. That and we don't have to worry about mowing in July, August and September which is nice. And we know it won't take much for the lawns to green back up when the rains start in October.
When the rain comes back (very soon!), we'll green up and all will be right again.
The answer is that it's really low maintenance and it prevents erosion while also lowering the complexity of putting in adequate drainage. It's also very efficient to maintain large swaths of grass with uniform equipment, whether it's with push mowers, riding mowers, or tractors.
Maintaining forest is challenging, dangerous, and more labor intensive than you might think. It's real easy to die doing forest work: trees really wanna kill you. Trees are always getting sick and grody. It's easy to accidentally kill healthy trees when you are culling dying/dead trees and, at least for me, making mistakes makes me feel sad and guilty about it. Chainsaws are easy to use and you really have to be not paying attention or not using protective equipment to hurt yourself with them -- it's the trees that are dangerous. This is one of the reasons why suburban developers don't go out of their way to plant forests even if it would make the area look nicer. There's also the question of who would maintain the forest in an area where everything is subdivided into small private plots, but any living forest requires a lot of space to grow.
It is also more intellectually challenging to maintain forest. This is reflected by the difference in wage rates between forestry workers and normal landscapers. Stump removal when you have to do it is also its own set of challenges.
The other reason why uniform lawns are easier to work with is something that only dawned on me after years of letting the weeds grow amidst the normal grass. Weeds grow at different rates and have different impacts on the soil. It's a lot easier to maintain a uniform lawn. A weedy lawn can look cool at some parts of the year with lots of wildflowers and then look crappy at other times when the flowers all die and it's just some weird scratchy bunch of weeds that creates a weird erosion pattern, which is a problem that is more expensive/difficult to fix than just never having it happen in the first place.
I understand the intellectual perspective in this article but the explanation is very silly in light of the practical considerations that become apparent when you are responsible for land yourself. The labor-hour estimate in this article is also totally delusional, or based on some absurd standard that no one actually keeps their tiny lawn to.
I mean, how would you even spent 150 hours a year maintaining a tiny suburban lawn? Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper? Huh? That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.
This reads like a lawncare shill quote
So, if you have a few acres of forest yourself, none of the above things are going to be happening, you actually have to build trails through it and then maintain them. And, you will constantly have fallen branches and fallen trees that need to be cleared. It's a lot of work. I have a few acres of forest in the PNW.
Northern New England is almost entirely forested, and it isn't managed or maintained to anything like the same degree as West Coast forests, and yet we don't have the problems with giant segments going up in smoke every year. We don't even really have suburbs. We just have towns that are mostly forests, separated from each other by areas that are completely forests with one road going through.
I'm (obviously) no expert in this, but it seems that our largely untouched forests do a lot better than the ones that are so intensively managed. I have to imagine this has been studied and state maintenance of forests isn't just some giant government boondoggle that leads to massive fires and no one's noticed, but that's how it looks from several thousand miles away!
The undergrowth just uh, under-grows unless you expressly clear it out to make it more pleasant to walk around in.
A quarter acre of St Augustine grass in Georgia produces about 5-10 of those 30 gallon yard waste bags full of grass clippings each week at the height of the growing season. The clippings cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it. It takes approximately 5 hours a week to maintain such a yard.
Similarly in the fall, the trees will produce similar amounts of leaves each week that also cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it.
As long as you've got a water source, you can easily create a tiny patch of green that can survive for decades unattended - even in the midst of a desert.
My grass grows quickly in Spring and Fall, but it takes about 20 minutes to mow it. I don't usually bother to pick up the clippings unless it's really long.
They have to or else it dies/gets overrun almost immediately. They get crispy after 2-3 days w/o water. Start dying in a week. Lawns here are a freaking nightmare to keep up.
Electric mowers and robots have fragile little blades designed to weight as little as possible because they're running on batteries. They'll be damaged or break entirely if they strike a root or rock.
I had to use a self propelled dual blade mulching power to handle the terrain and so I didn't have to spend an hour or more walking the property gathering all the pine codes and other crap that might stall out a lesser mower.
Mulching seems to be fine if you cut along the rule of third (cut less than 1/3 of the thing at a time). Even side discharge seems ok, especially as you spiral over the discharge, re-mowing it.
I used to let it grow out, but thatch became an issue. Which is why raking them up makes sense (or dethatching).
Now I cut slightly on the short side, more often, which seems to naturally favor centipede over dandelions almost anywhere there's good sun & water & drainage. Nothing really beats mowed centipede, for me; letting it grow wild invites snakes et al, and paving it would be hot.
I don't understand why clippings kill the grass. Can you explain?
In my case, my last lawn was St. Augustine which is a drought tolerant variety of grass typically planted in Florida or on golf courses because it requires less watering. In Georgia however there's no shortage of water so it thrived and during the peak growing season it would easily grow five or six inches a week.
So I could either mow twice a week, mow once week and bag, or rip up and re-sod the whole thing. None of which was really desirable.
Otherwise, I always leave my clippings on my grass, even if decently long. The grass survive just fine.
If you have a tree canopy, as most older homes in Georgia do, then you have to contend with the debris from the trees (e.g. fallen limbs, leaves, pine needles, pine cones, acorns, etc). If you want the lawn to look nice you need to do edging, weeding, watering and fertilizer=. In Georgia most homes have "pine islands" that have some sort of ground covering like mulch or pine straw and contain plants ans shrubs you need to maintain.
I don’t doubt a slow person or a meticulous lawnhead could fill the time, to be clear, but that same level of effort and speed should be applied to measuring the difficulty of maintaining a forested plot in order to make a useful comparison.
Stop any of that and the grass starts dying immediately. It's common here to see folks resod every year if not multiple times.
Trees don't care about you one iota. I guarantee, humans are much more deadly to trees than trees are to humans.
>This is one of the reasons why suburban developers don't go out of their way to plant forests
The main reason is that it is hard (read expensive) to route plumbing around roots and what not, so it's much easier to just tear them down and work from a flat area. It's typical WASP mentality to move into a space, kill off all of the original inhabitants, and then claim it as your own.
>The other reason why uniform lawns
Yes, grass lawns help keep the soil from erroding away from the foundation. Once the lawn is established, it defintely makes it more difficult for foreign grass to grow.
> That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.
Lawn care doesn't have to be a race. I enjoy my weekly lawncare routine. It's a nice moderate outdoor workout pushing a mower, raking, trimming, etc. When you get done, you get to sit on the patio, enjoy a tasty beverage, and feel good about what you accomplished. Then again, I grew up outdoors more than I was indoors back when kids did that kind of thing.
If you despise outdoors, heat, sweat, physical work, then of course you'll hate yard work.
As someone who lives in the UK - yes, not me personally, but I have neighbours(very elderly) who I see every week literally on the knees, clipping the grass with what effectively looks like nail scissors. I mean, they are retired, they can do whatever they want with their time, but it is a little bit nuts.
I think that depends on your frame of reference. Sure in comparison with maintaining a forest the way you describe it's low (though note that there's always the option of not maintaining a forest at all, except for paths through it). But compared to maintaining a meadow (even mown piecewise to strive for max biodiversity) where you'd mow max 2 times a year, it's rather high.
It's a lot easier to maintain a uniform lawn
Depends. I don't consider mowing a piece of grass 2 times a year a lot harder than doing all of it every 2 weeks, on the contrary. You need the correct tool for the job though.
when the flowers all die
That doesn't have to be like that, e.g. in my Western-European climate that is only so in the middle of winter; for the rest my grassland has flowering species about 9 months a year. Does require some insight into ecology of grasslands to get such situation though. What you talk about is typically what one gets when not mowing 'correctly'. I.e. wrong time of year, or too much or too little, or not removing the vegetation after mowing it, etc.
that creates a weird erosion pattern
Can you explain that? I'm pretty sure I've seen studies where old grasslands are better for erosion than short lawns.
A lot of my neighbors have had their lawns overridden by crab grass anyway so is that still a lawn at that point?
Having a lawn also is nice for the kids.
You don’t need to spray for mosquitoes and ticks and ruin the local ecosystem when they’re happy in their field at a healthy distance with a nice, clean lawn in between you.
https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/grassland/grass10/clover/#:~:te....
Well, I mow twice a year, don’t water except for young trees, put the leaves of my 30 trees in compost in automn, and that’s it. Just let it grow.
You can use clover or any kind of cover instead of “grass”, and plant trees to keep it in the shade so it doesn’t burn. You can also grow 20-40cm high flowers as well if you like.
That said, you can look into growing grasses°, sedges, hostas, and wildflowers that are indigenous to your geographic region. Become good friends with the folks at your local nursery, and they'll be glad to help you out.
°: not things like Kentucky bluegrass (which isn't indigenous to North America) or the various types of fescue (many of which are native to Europe); more like buffalograss and Canada wild rye
My family lives on a 1/3 acre lot in a neighborhood that was built around 1960. Thankfully, there is no social pressure in our locale to maintain a "perfect" lawn. Each house does its own thing, ranging from fully wooded lots, to "perfect" lawns, and everything in between. I'm using the term "perfect" for the kind of lawn described in the article, more or less.
Our house is in between. What I can tell you is that there are portions of our lot that we mow. Everything else is left to chance. We don't fertilize or use weed killers. We don't water. (Fertilizer increases the need for water). The lawn is grass plus maybe a dozen other species.
The grass grows in the spring, we mow a couple times, then it goes dormant as the weather gets more dry. The weeds keep it green. Through the remainder of the summer and fall, we mow maybe 3-4 times at most. I rake the leaves from the trees, use the mower to shred them, and use them for compost in the vegetable garden.
The vegetable garden is growing by a few square feet per year. I bought an ancient roto-tiller off the Craig, and gradually expand the garden at the expense of the lawn. I would also be happy to let other kinds of brush grow, but it hasn't begun to happen yet.
The kids were fine in our back yard. They didn't care about the weeds. The neighbors have not complained.
By and large, the people in our 'hood with "perfect" lawns, are retired, and have the time to work on their lawns and gardens, plus, no kids.
When I travel to the neighborhood where I grew up, in another state, it's a totally different world. Every single lawn is "perfect," with no weeds. My parents told me that a couple of their neighbors had large trees cut down because the trees were shading their grass! The difference is so stark that it's almost creepy. There's also one or two full size pickup trucks in front of every house, that almost completely obscure the lawns from the street. Bizarre.
Since it's a weekly chore, and hot/long summer, I outsource the mowing. If it was 3-4 times a year I would totally DIY.
I've lived in the places like your parents neighborhood. My neighbor a couple doors down had a flawless lawn. But he also had a guy come over every day for ~4 hours to piddle around in the yard, hedges, trimming things, pool; he was a full stack grounds keeper. Imagine what that cost, lol.
The ant hills would pop up after a storm too.
I take care of the rest of the maintenance in the summer but that’s a few hours per week sometimes depending on weather. Luckily this summer we’ve had ample rain so watering has mainly been cut out but weeds have thrived.
The lawn is the black dress of garden fasion; reliable and timeless.
Source: just escaped an HOA after 10 years. wound up there because it was the only choice we had at the time. years of misfortune kept us there.
Just no. No it wasn't
Common sense should tell you every organization has a beginning.
I moved to where I am now, a couple of years ago, with the understanding there was no HOA.
However, it turns out there was what I'll call a "shadow" HOA - an informal group of people that would like to be one but don't have official standing (yet).
Due to some recent events, they are trying to make it official, have instituted a mailing list, have mentioned possibly having voluntary donations to support the legal costs, etc.
I don't think real estate agents selling homes in the neighborhood are necessarily telling people what's going on either.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25782048-beyond-the-war-...
So I guess my point is, gardens aren't new, and many US residents have the space and the disposable income.
The problems we have trying to maintain a monoculture!
Lawns are only a problem in areas where water is scarce. Sure, you can think of other problems with it that are "bad" for the environment, but so is literally every human activity. In my area lawns are heavily used and surrounded by flower beds, especially by families with kids, like mine.
It’s really neat to see how they optimize certain grasses this way and how many years of breeding and selection it takes.
Battery-powered leaf blowers are so incredibly good that I have a hard time understanding why anyone buys a new gas-powered leaf blower.
However, we also have three massive cottonwood trees among plenty of other maple and crap that amounts to feet of fallen leaves to clean up.
On a whim I got a backpack style gas leaf blower, and now we only use the battery one for "maintenance" blowing. There simply isn't a good analogy to describe the difference.
That said, at my previous house in the suburbs, the battery powered one was plenty sufficient, so YMMV.
[1] https://sustainability.wustl.edu/rethinking-lawn-equipment-2...
Like, leaf blowers aren't great for the environment, and maybe mandating catalytic converters for them would improve air quality, but these specific claims are all made in bad intellectual faith.
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.h...
What I can find there is an hour of lawn mowing being comparable to 100 miles of car travel. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.h... an hour of leaf blowing is probably worse, but that study is silent on the topic. (It’s also likely that far more hours of lawn mowing than leaf blowing is done in aggregate.)
If you’re trying to move some dry oak leaves, electrics work fine. Wet leaves and acorns in new grass are a different story IME.
I’ll know electrics are better when the crews are using them.
I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something children mow on the weekend. I live in a richer neighborhood now, which means more lawn services, and I really do despise them for the noise. But online culture would have me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated on lawncare as a hobby. What I see is the opposite, people want a clean looking yard and find it easy to pay for it to be watered, mowed, fertilized, weeded, sprayed, edged, blown, aerated, and whatever else gets bundles together for an affordable price.
Do we only think that Americans are obsessed with lawns because of how large the lawncare industry is? Or maybe the culture really is different in places where effort is required for anything close to green 12 months a year?
The industrial lawn is a monoculture which doesn't exist in nature, as such it is inherently less efficient because it doesn't stack functions or yields.
For more info: https://youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini
I'm talking small scale food systems you may set into motion on a plot of land 1/3 or less!
The best thing you can do right now is to raise your mower blade deck up as high as possible and only mow one or twice per quarter.
My channel nickname is "unturf", and ill give you hundreds of ways and reasons to build a natural food producing systems at your house!
I look to a future of one guided by permaculture, using technology as a means to increase yield of natural systems. Let's build a solar punk future together, one where we build systems which not only sustain but regenerate!
I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in
person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's
feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something
children mow on the weekend [...] But online culture would have
me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated
on lawncare as a hobby.
I've lived in middle class American suburbs nearly all my life, child and adult.
Nobody obsesses over their lawns. Just never seen it.
I mean, sure, if you have a lawn... you spend a certain amount of time and/or money on your lawn and while you're at it, you like to do it right. Just like literally anything else. Laundry, vacuuming, whatever. Everybody likes their home and their person to look nice if they're lucky enough to be that far up the ladder on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The lawn thing may be somewhat unique to America but wanting one's home to look nice most definitely is not.
To put it in somewhat objective terms I live on a 1/4 acre lot and I spend less than 30 minutes a week mowing and edging, for approximately 7 months per year.
Lawn fertilizer is about, I don't know, $30 a year. If you buy a decent lawn mower and edger that $200-$300 and they should last 10-15 years. So I guess you can amortize that out to an additional ~$20 per year. Oh, and $10 worth of gasoline for the mower. (I was gifted an ICE mower; would have chosen electric myself)
Folks in rural and suburban areas having lawns and needing to spend an hour a week on lawncare is already infinitely more time than folk in urban centers spend on such tasks. To the urbanite, what the rest of the country considers "lawn obsessed" is only a difference of degree, not kind. For the media producer--who, again, is almost universally an urbanite--to communicate this feeling to the rest of the country, they have to exaggerate the effort spent.
It's also true that LA and NY draw people from all over the country. Have you ever been to LA or Manhattan? Nobody that lives there is from there. Those places are alternate-reality bubbles, for sure, but lots (most?) of those people were born somewhere else and likely grew up in a more representative part of the country.
So, I think there's also an element of "artist" types rebelling against what they felt were stifling suburban upbringings?
Totally unproveable of course. Just a feeling I've always gotten.
After I got mine, half the neighborhood eventually replaced their mowers with electrics and the drop in neighborhood nose has also been great.
Personally, only about a quarter of my property is grass, and I am amazed at the acres of grass I see in the country, but I don't think I would want less than half an acre's worth around the house otherwise (barring some decorative plants).
This is a really good podcast.
so this seemingly innocuous and joy bringing landscape motif becomes a symbol of modernity's incessant terraforming.
A plain bland green field. Never bothered anyone. Considered this way it becomes somehow obscene. an abstract, banal terror. Sort of like a race of orcs using human skin mats to adorn their living rooms.
I never water my lawn and it always comes back to life when the dry season ends.
My other plants have to be watered or they'll die.
In the 1950s, when perfect lawn 'suddenly' became popular (as per the article), both wealthy Americans and racist Americans (there's a lot of overlap) moving to and driving the creation of suburbs were trying to find ways to exclude both poor people and non-white people. This was implemented more and less blatantly to varying degrees, and lawns are one outcome of that exclusionary desire. Wealthy whites realized that lawns were a perfect signal of wealth, and racist whites realized that lawns were a reliable and deniable signal of "cleanliness", which is code for "whiteness". They both enforced those signals with codes and laws (and later HOAs) that require a tidily-kept lawn, in order to exclude anyone unable to afford the time and money to maintain one, and both groups benefited from each other's efforts.
Those laws continue to be enforced today in many neighborhoods, against people without the resources to maintain a lawn, and against people who voluntarily choose not to. That's why police are called on someone who grows a garden in their front yard: if anyone can just not grow a lawn, then the exclusionary groups think the neighborhood will decline into poverty and crime, because it will no longer be restricted to wealthy and/or white residents only.
https://www.fitsnews.com/2019/08/21/south-carolina-women-goe...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-06-me-51449...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798209/angry-woman...
https://homeimprovementnewsjournal.com/man-arrested-for-shoo...
I invite you to search on your own if you require further evidence, and if you do choose to do so, I hope the search terms above help save you time.
#1: Woman was arrested for contempt of court
#2: Man was arrested for violating terms of probation
#3: This seems to fit the narrative, but, I quote: "The judge admitted that [unkempt-lawn-haver] is not a criminal and it was not a criminal case." It appears that a judge gave her the option of community service or 6 hours in jail to waive a (civil) fine?
#4: Appears to be about police arresting someone who shot lawnmowers with a gun
Interesting.
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https://features.propublica.org/medical-debt/when-medical-de...
Also there is worse happening, like where a city in I think MO was using yard upkeep fines and their nonpayment to put people in jail and then condemn their house so that it could be seized for property development.
Before someone notes this is extremely bloodthirsty, it's not just about a lawn being cut, it's about the state arbitrarily demanding your money.
The quote from the judge in 3 makes it clear that the woman in question was never charged with a criminal offense, and in fact chose to sit in a jail for 6 hours in lieu of paying a civil fine.
As for the other two cases - the issues started with the lawn upkeep, yes, but the criminal aspect slips in for unrelated reasons. In #1, it's not clear exactly why contempt charges came into play, and it's quite unusual (and in many jurisdictions, not legal) to charge someone with criminal contempt for simple refusal to pay a civil fine...which leads me to believe there's something key being omitted here. In #2, it seems like the guy would have been fine keeping an unkempt lawn had he not explicitly violated a previous probation agreement; this isn't a situation that applies to the average person.
1. A rich, or legally crafty individual can get a court to invalidate the demand, or tie up the issue in legal process for years or indefinitely.
2. The government will escalate until the individual is in jail.
Jail isn't the first step in the enforcement process, but it's on the list, and fair to say that people were jailed because they didn't maintain their lawns to government standards following other enforcement efforts.
This is not particular to America, and is known as conspicuous consumption, which is also what the article covers.
> both wealthy Americans and racist Americans (there's a lot of overlap) moving to and driving the creation of suburbs were trying to find ways to exclude both poor people and non-white people.
Were wealthy Americans more or less racist than less wealthy Americans in this time?
Since you mentioned lawns were a status symbol as part of a hierarchy, why is it not sufficient that they were maintaining lawns out of a desire for status i.e. "keeping up with the Joneses"?
Indeed, this is what the article said was an anxiety of the time.
> A 1959 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the psychosomatic effects of suburban development and “conspicuous consumption” explicitly mentioned the lawn as a source of psychological tension. “Many of our patients are overconcerned about keeping up appearances: ... there cannot be a blade of crabgrass in the lawn.”
There was evidently a hierarchy, but I don't think you can so easily call its primary motivation as racism, or classism.
What?
Forbidding your plants to flourish is akin to cutting the tails and ears of your dogs.