Book Review

Lawn
Shirley is mowing. She is riding the larger of the two sit-down mowers, taken out from between the two little push-mowers there by the wall of the shed on which hang the gasoline powered weed-eater, the lively lad, the fertilizer spreader, the leaf- blower, and yet other strange piercing and rooting tools I do not understand. Shirley has detached the big old lawn-roller that levels the mounds endlessly humped up by the backs of the busy moles over almost every foot of this two acres of lawn which wander over the level and down almost to the banks of Owl Creek here in Knox County in Central Ohio where I have lived for twenty-three years, in my slovenly rented cabin: an oasis of undergrowth, jewel weed, fern, crabgrass, geranium weed, wildflowers and other wild and orphaned plants here in the gorgeous desert of ever-spreading lawn.

Now Shirley is mowing, her back straight, her shoulders level, two hands on the wheel, happy. Once mowed, always to be mowed, like the hairs one foolishly shaves from one's ears. Lawn. With that fierce tolerance characteristic of rural Ohio, Shirley allows me my wallow of untidiness on the west side of the property. I am her friend and long-term, probably life-term tenant. But she doesn't understand my scruffiness. And I think she is obsessed with the cleanly lines of lawn.

Sure as the tide, sure as the desert sands, lawn engulfs my place -- yes and Knox County itself. Some of the lawns, like ours, rolling, tree-dotted, beautiful in their own way. Some unintelligible pool tables where once in my memory there were tall weeds, meadows gone wild, and even thick stands of trees. An hour from Columbus, some of our hillsides now are sites for mansions with, sometimes, a quarter of a mile of lawn descending with here and there a clump of trees. But everywhere, from the isolated trailer to the smallest house, every place where there is a single residence, there is lawn, and always more, more lawn.

It is an American obsession, and one that is now richly and carefully chronicled by Virginia Scott Jenkins, who helps us to remember that these things we see come out of American history as surely and as tellingly as the automobile itself. Common space. Private space.

Many readers of Synapse who may be trying to further the creation of environment-friendly habitat in their home communities will be well aware that the lawn is, very nearly, an American invention -- as well as obsession -- dating back in the form which interests us no further than the mid-nineteenth century, a social contrivance.

When the freeholders and peasants were driven from the commons in the British Isles (and elsewhere) then came the creation of the picturesque fenced park around the lonely manor -- a park which was sometimes decorated with versions of an idealized peasantry, mocked-up cottages, hired dancers around an invented May Pole. The self-same story is told in a different key of our own Appalachian Americans reinvented as transformed cultural icons once they are, in effect, pushed out of the real world. Our Knox County lawns are sometimes decorated with deer as well as with those black jockeys with the single, serviceable extended arm: jockeys whose faces have now been painted white -- though theirs was an honorable and important niche early on, as we now at last begin to hear. Lawns tell stories: that is their function.

Lawns. Hours in which mowing is illegal are now set in Cincinnati when the ever more frequent ozone alerts occur. Though, say, selfless Unitarians may dream of communally owned lawn mowers and even shared lawns, such experiments repeatedly fail. The duty to mow is perceived, correctly in the event, as synonymous with good citizenship and maintained property values.

It is that sense of space, distancing the house from the road and (unlike the grazing animal or the garden) the owner from the world of labor. That the lawn itself might be simply a mistake is not yet often thought. But, like the bustle, it may yet disappear as it came, a useless decoration bespeaking a certain culture and wistfulness for class. That will be an enrichment to our world. Meanwhile, this good-humored but devastating book may help us on the way.

"As a humble illustration of the transported landscapes in which we live, take the autumnal aspect of the central and eastern United States, roughly the region from Boston and Philadelphia to Minneapolis and Kansas City. In all that area, green in the autumnal landscape is a measure of European influence. The green grasses of pasture and roadside, the green trees of orchards and parks, are greens which have come with us from Europe. Our own native flora was bred for our violent American climate. It goes into the winter condition with a bang."

In thinking about such things "one realizes that unconsciously as well as deliberately, man carries whole floras about the globe with him, that he now lives surrounded by transported landscapes, that our commonest everyday plants have been transformed by their long associations with us so that many roadsides and dooryard plants are artifacts" (9-10).

Jenkins, too, notes how "Foreign grasses and weeds spread rapidly [in colonial America], some even ahead of European settlement, and within several generations were believed to be indigenous to America" (14) -- yes, even Kentucky Bluegrass.

The lawn Shirley mows, the whole concept of lawn, is not only such an artifact but also a cultural and economic symbol whose brief history and almost comic creation is chronicled in Virginia Scott Jenkins's The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (Washington, 1994). It is one of those books that changes the way we see, and tries explicitly to change the way we do.

The concept of the lawn as "land covered with grass kept closely mown, especially in front of or around a house" is, she writes, an invention of the Fifties. Initially she discovered that before the Civil War very few Americans had lawns of any kind at all. She traces the evolution and present triumph of the Lawn through the somewhat familiar evolution of the American suburbs, and "the new landscape form -- the single family house surrounded by grass."

"The first of these suburban communities were founded about the time of the Civil War near Easy Coast cities...encouraged by the expansion of the railroad, street car, and trolley lines. The public park movement...directly influenced suburban development. Late nineteenth century suburban communities were modelled after parks and were frequently named 'park'... ." Then in the Twenties, with the automobile, came a "second great expansion." But "the third and by far most widespread impetus to suburban development came after World War II, financed by the federal government through low cost mortgages for veterans and by government funding for highways. Builders drew on a tradition of upper middle class suburban development and furnished their blue-collar tract housing with lawns" (4).

If so much seems somewhat familiar, the rest is news:

Jenkins tells the story from the beginning in rich detail and what seems to be scrupulous scholarship, from the first adoption of "the front-lawn aesthetic" through the "democratization of the lawn," and it is a story of high comedy as well as one of incipient American tragedy.

The book needs and deserves to be read entire, and illustrations such as the one on the cover showing the smiling golf-pro Sam Snead pushing the latest Toro power mower in 1951 need to be contemplated. But here are some of the highlights I'll carry with me a long time:

The idea of a lawn came into being in Europe in the eighteenth century and the first American lawns were made by wealthy landowners late in the century, "people who learned of the new landscape fashion through books." (15) Many of us know first hand the examples of aristocratic grounds modelled at George Washington's Mt. Vernon and Jefferson's Montecello. But "front lawns did not catch the popular imagination and were not copied by middle class Americans until the development of suburban housing after the Civil War" (17).

"Before the late 1860's, when the first American lawn mowers were patented, grass was cut with a scythe or grazed by sheep or cows...Scything was an expensive operation even when labor was cheap. Cows or sheep were untidy or inconvenient..." (13)

Rich people's houses, not the green New England commons, were the model nineteenth-century Americans used for the lawn, whether consciously or not. In colonial America, the commons had been a litter of dirt paths and common use. "The peaceful New England greens were a nineteenth century creation," probably in response to "nostalgia for a simpler rural past and a new craving for spatial beauty that came from romanticism and transcendentalism."

Whatever its origins, the lawn was soon an idea to be sold. Jenkins devotes a whole chapter to the influence of three organizations in popularizing the rise of the lawn. They are the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) the United States Golf Association (USGA), and the Garden Club of America (GCA). Though there is a comic side to all this -- as when a USDA researcher patents a spray-on dye that will keep grass looking green all winter long -- the story is one we seem to know before we read it, the story of advertising and models of affluence and the development, in short, of the suburban world with its many beauties and dreams of community that have now somehow gone awry.

The other side of the story is maybe heartening: for what we have driven one way by association, advertising, and self-interest we can equally well change by those very means. So we are back to the familiar question of how we define our common interests and what we understand to be the true social cost -- and what we understand to be a classy way to live.

Though Jenkins doesn't say it, it seems as if the disappearance of farmland, often transformed into suburban developments, is synonymous with the transformation of field and pasture into unproductive, indeed almost unused, and very expensive lawn. This is paralleled by the use of USDA agents and resources, no longer needed by the farm, to serve the suburb. The same agency that gave us "hard tomatoes" gave us hybrid grasses of uniform height and color growable, with enough chemicals and water to bathe them, anywhere in the United States.

"The culmination of the lawn culture of the nineteenth century was the establishment of twentieth-century country clubs and golf courses, the suburban equivalent to the urban park... . Thorstein Veblen noted that grazing animals were no longer acceptable on lawns in the late nineteenth century because they were too suggestive of thrift and usefulness." Hence, he suggested that deer or antelope be substituted "since they were not vulgarly lucrative in fact or in suggestion. Where live deer were impossible to maintain, many homeowners substituted life- size cast-iron stags" (32). Here in Knox County, 1996, the little Bambi deer are usually made of concrete.

The same point has been made about the idea of wilderness, as discussed below. As Jenkins shows us, the idea of the lawn is part of an imagined and even imaginary world that we see (in this case, often, in ads) and then imitate.

Perhaps the only altogether natural landscape, if that means one unshaped by human, is wilderness. Like a lot of people with little money, for months of the year I try to live in and near the national parks and forests, waiting out the Ohio winter. These places are to some degree -- usually a great degree -- very much shaped and touched by humans. "Tree zoos," a radical friend calls them, but I mostly love the roads in, the paths around, even the omnipresent intricate banked rockwork of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the Thirties. Still, where on the long spectrum from the invented, chemical, manicured lawn to pure wilderness should we frame our dreams and shape our practical decisions about the landscape we would have about us, even in the suburbs, our characteristic way of life for better or worse?

In his Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale, 1967; 3rd edition,967) Roderick Nash taught us that the "garden scenario" (of such thinkers as Rene J. Dubos) just as much as "wasteland scenario" means the end of the wild. In the Garden Earth, "The fertility of the soil is not only maintained but enhanced. Fruit trees support song birds. Carefully managed streams run clear and pure. The air is unpolluted. Forests provide an endless supply of wood. Large cities are rare as people decentralize into the hinterland. Many live on self-sufficient family farms. The animals permitted to exist are safe and useful. A softer variety of technology enables man to live gracefully and gratefully as part of the natural community... . It is an appealing vision whose roots run back through Thomas Jefferson's deification of the yeoman farmer to the Garden of Eden. But wilderness is just as dead in the garden as it is in the concrete wasteland" (380).

We can't have everything. There are more and more people, less and less available space, and necessary choices are made. The Neahtawanta Inn and the housed Research and Education Center is one lived, deliberate choice looking for its balance, made out of love of the earth, tacking between ideals and reality. Shirley and Paul's place here in central Ohio is another, made from the same love even though working from different, unarticulated principles. It shares this, anyway: a certain gentleness, and a kind of toughness. This vision is pure Knox County. Does it make any sense?

Another reason for the dominance of the lawn is perhaps that "Despite many changes in American society in the relationship between the sexes, the front lawn remains unchallenged as a male domain" (132).

In this emotionally charged issue, the chapter "High-Tech Horticulture" is a model of reasonableness. Although Jenkins tells us in graphic detail the ghastly story of the chemical lawn, and recounts in detail many of the local struggles for alternatives to the lawn, she also reports the arguments of the lawn's strongest defenders, to cool the sentences of hotheads like me. For instance, she quotes the professor of turf management at Purdue University:

"Expansive open lawns throughout our suburbs are an American tradition. Indeed, these green, grassy surroundings represent important individual contributions to the American landscape. With our recent concern for the environment, we should not overlook the value of turf for absorbing carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen, and stabilizing dust, thereby reducing pollution" (180). And she quotes other lawn advocates about the feelings of closeness to nature, propriety, and security the lawn gives some.

Her final paragraph is a balanced, though clearly partisan, appraisal: "A new landscape aesthetic is a cultural creation, and it remains to be seen whether the environmental movement in this country can enlist as potent a group of supporters and teachers for the twenty-first century as the lawn industry, the Garden Club of America, the U. S. Golf Association, and the U.. Department of Agriculture did during th twentieth century"187).

Even as I write this paragraph I hear the big mower start again -- or perhaps it is the leaf-blower. But in my mind's eye I see Shirley on top of her big mower differently after Jenkins's book.

These large grassy areas she maintains are not quite a lawn, strictly speaking: where the broad-leaf weeds take over, no chemical warfare is declared, just a prolonged yin and yang of cropping and coming back; and the grass is not of uniform height and color at all costs, but a rolling and somewhat varied park -- though mostly there is only this one loiterer in it. Shirley, like most rural people, and perhaps like most home owners, loves and is a steward to her land. If she yearns to mow until nothing called weed or underbrush remains, in fact she and Paul allow me to live in this wholly unimproved wildness of a kind. If she and the rest of us have been sold not the best model of stewardship, then a better model has to be made, embodied, and, yes, marketed.

Perhaps we are doing this now.

Return to the Index of Synapse 37, Fall 1996