As a kid, I never asked, Why do we even have a lawn?, but the answer is fascinating.
In 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing published the first landscape-gardening book aimed at an American audience — his “Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening” — which promoted “grass mown into a softness like velvet” and led to our modern turf war against nature:
As an example of what he had in mind, Downing pointed to the Livingston estate, near Hudson, New York. (Privately, in a letter to a friend, he noted that maintaining the grounds of the Livingston estate required the labors of ten men.) “No expenditure in ornamental gardening is, to our mind, productive of so much beauty as that incurred in producing a well kept lawn,” he wrote.
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Having migrated into many parts of the United States that did not yet belong to the United States when the “Treatise” was published, the lawn today is nearly ubiquitous. Its spread has given rise to an entire industry, or, really, complex of industries — Americans spend an estimated forty billion dollars each year on grass — and to the academic discipline of turf management, degrees in which can now be obtained from, among other schools, the University of Massachusetts and Ohio State. 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.
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Among the dozen or so main grasses that make up the American lawn, almost none are native to America. Kentucky bluegrass comes from Europe and northern Asia, Bermuda grass from Africa, and Zoysia grass from East Asia. These and other so-called turfgrasses are botanically ambidextrous; they can reproduce sexually, by putting out seeds, and asexually, by spreading laterally. (Biologists believe that they acquired this second ability some twenty million years ago, during the Miocene, when large herbivores, including the ancestors of the modern horse, switched from eating leaves to munching grass.)Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated. In his anti-lawn essay “Why Mow?,” Michael Pollan puts it this way: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
In the early days of lawns — British aristocrats started planting them sometime around the start of the eighteenth century — there were two ways to mow. A landowner could use grazing animals, like sheep, which meant also employing sheepkeepers, or he could send out bands of scythe-wielding servants. Then, in 1830, Edwin Beard Budding, an engineer from Gloucestershire, came up with a third alternative — “a machine for mowing lawns, etc.” (Supposedly, Budding was inspired by the rotating blades then used to trim the nap on carpets.) Budding’s invention made the task of cutting grass faster and cheaper and, at least for the maker of the new mowers, profitable. Further mechanical improvements followed. In 1870, an American inventor named Elwood McGuire designed a lightweight mower with an innovative wheel design. By 1885, U.S. manufacturers were pumping out machines at the rate of fifty thousand a year. In 1893, the first steam-powered mower was patented, and a few decades later the gasoline-powered mower hit the market. An advertisement for an Ideal Junior Power Mower, from 1922, celebrated the exceptional efficiency of the new technology. It asserted that many property owners, “who previously had to hire two or three men to keep their grass cut, now do the work with one of these.”
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.”
Over time, the fact that anyone could keep up a lawn was successfully, though not altogether logically, translated into the notion that everyone ought to. Many communities around the country adopted “weed laws” mandating that all yards be maintained to a certain uniform standard. Such laws are, for the most part, still on the books. Homeowners who, for one reason or another, don’t toe the line have found themselves receiving citations and fines and, in some (admittedly unusual) cases, wrangling with the police. Just last summer, a seventy-year-old widow from Orem, Utah, was led in handcuffs to a holding cell, after letting her grass go brown. She became a celebrity in the blogosphere, where she was known as the Lawn Lady.
Pretty much by definition, a lawn is unnatural. Still, there are degrees of unnaturalness. Even as the American lawn was being democratized, it was also becoming more artificial.
Turfgrasses have a seasonal cycle: they grow quickly when conditions are favorable — for cool-weather species like Kentucky bluegrass, this is in spring, while for warm-weather species like Bermuda grass it’s in summer — and then they slow down. During the slow phase, the grass becomes dull-colored or, if the weather is dry, yellow or brown. In 1909, a German chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to synthesize ammonia. One use for what became known as the Haber-Bosch process was to manufacture explosives — the process was perfected just in time for the First World War — and a second was to produce synthetic fertilizer. It was observed that repeated applications of synthetic fertilizer could counteract turfgrasses’ seasonal cycle by, in effect, tricking the plants into putting out new growth. Sensing a potential bonanza, lawn-care companies began marketing the idea of an ever-green green. The Scotts Company recommended that customers apply its fertilizer, Turf Builder, no fewer than five times a year.
With the advent of herbicides, in the nineteen-forties, still tighter control became possible. As long as a hand trowel was the only option, weeding a lawn had been considered more or less hopeless, and most guides advised against even trying. (A lawn “thickly starred with the glowing yellow blossoms” of dandelions “isn’t in itself a bad picture,” the journal Country Life in America observed consolingly.) The new herbicides allowed gardeners to kill off plants that they didn’t care for with a single spraying.
One of the most popular herbicides was — and continues to be — 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4-D, as it is commonly known, a major ingredient in Agent Orange. Regrettably, 2,4-D killed not only dandelions but also plants that were beneficial to lawns, like nitrogen-fixing clover. To cover up this loss, any plant that the chemical eradicated was redefined as an enemy. “Once considered the ultimate in fine turf, a clover lawn is looked upon today by most authorities as not much better than a weed patch” is how one guidebook explained the change.
The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos — both of which affect the nervous system — took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to — among many other organisms — tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”