On Learning to Become a Lawn Scofflaw

Erin Fortenberry is a graduate of the comparative history of ideas program at the University of Washington. She has recently quit her day job in hopes of becoming a full-time scribbler.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, from the vantage point of a second story window on South Hill, I see very few people relaxing in their yards. This surprises me; fair days coming so few and far between in the Pacific Northwest, I expect the appearance of the sun to catalyze people into repose on those acres of grass they seem to have worked so hard for.

Instead, I witness what looks like anxiety manifested in the form of mowing, sprinkling, fertilizing and poisoning. These activities have apparently become the yard’s recreation. Peering out my window, I wonder how we got to this point; why we think it necessary to spend much valuable resources (time, money, gas, water) on a monotonous landscape we then forget to enjoy.

I find some clues in a tome on the subject by Virginia Scott Jenkins. “In our transient society,” she writes, “people are judged by the care taken of their lawns — a neatly kept front lawn indicates that the family’s life is in order. … Municipal regulations about lawns may be justified by suspicions that long grass harbors vermin and insects, but the underlying reasons are moral and aesthetic.” I nod my head in eager agreement with Jenkins’ assessment, but am still not completely satisfied. How, exactly, did turf become a moral issue? I investigate the lawn’s origins in hopes of placating my confusion.

I find that the earliest lawns flanked the mansions of the 18th century aristocratic British. In his comprehensive exploration of the origins and mysterious draw of the American lawn, Ted Steinberg writes that, “The lawn had become a marker of class privilege [in 18th century Britain] in part because one had to be rich enough to afford to hire all the laborers needed to cut it.” The lawn mower was invented in 1830, and as Steinberg writes, “[laid] the groundwork for the lawn’s eventual democratization.”

Bluegrass — now one of the most ubiquitous lawn grasses in the country and, as such, the subject of so many roaring mowers — was first imported to America by European colonists who used it to graze their livestock. Later, as Jenkins attests, the U.S.D.A., “Through hybridization … developed lawn grasses that [would] grow in all regions of the U.S.”

As in Britain, the early American lawn was a status symbol available only to the wealthy. But the interstate highway system and the suburbs that radiated from it acted as equalizers for the lawn. Suburban areas being, on principle, more spacious than urban homes, people had more space, and thus, room to adopt a status symbol formerly out of reach to the middle class.

But the freedom of the Eisenhower era — freedom of the open road, of new-found open space — was paradoxical. For if the average American citizen of the paranoid 1950s didn’t choose to fully embrace the golf-course style lawn, he might soon find himself ostracized from the neighborhood. In other words, as Steinberg writes, “The lawn became the outdoor expression of fifties conformism.” A conformism that seems to have continued, and that now, in an age in which we are told to fear our neighbor and any transgressions she might make, may be stronger than ever.

I am certain of my immunity to this yard conformity until I leave the country for two weeks and return to my parent’s house to find what I had thought I wanted the American public to embrace: an unattended lawn. The grass is of varied lengths, the tallest of it reaching a foot or so in height. Chairs in the backyard are subsumed by the stuff; seedy green heads poke up through the seats of them in a siege of late spring exuberance. There are now forests of clover where there used to be only homogenous turf, and some floral volunteers have begun an anarchic march through the cracks of the patio.

I take note of all of this fecund growth with an unease that surprises me; I’m supposed to love the green waves of grass-gone-wild, but in love’s place find only a sense of duty to cut. After my initial survey of the backyard, I move to the front, and it is here that the urge to conform most viciously rears its head. Tall grass interspersed with weeds is bordered on both sides by the neighbors’ uniformly mown, weed-free lawns. “Which one of these things is not like the others?” I say to a friend who has accompanied me on this tour of my young freedom lawn and he chuckles a little while I wonder where the push mower is.

I find myself trying to justify to this friend (victim of many of my diatribes regarding lawns, damage to the natural environment and conformity) why I am going to mow the lawn. “The higher the grass gets,” I say, “the more work it’ll be to mow with a push mower.” I also try, “But it would be nice to have a place to lie down” (with which I am rightly regaled with: “you can lie down in tall grass”) and “I should at least clear some of that bushy stuff around the chairs so that people are not obscured from one another by walls of greenery.” The desperation of my arguments is palpable, but I leave the yard as it is for the time.

Before my parents left on vacation, I proudly declared to my mother that their time away would allow for an experiment: I wasn’t going to mow the lawn. The possible outcomes were legion: Would neighbors, fed up with the state of our yard, mow some of it themselves? Would they leave notes bemoaning the lack of maintenance? Would Molotov cocktails fly through the windows while pestilence and terrorists hid in the grass? Not only would the experiment allow me to gauge the level of pressure to conform, it would also allow for a rare glimpse of what my parent’s lawn would do with its new-found freedom.

It generally went the way I thought I wanted it to: tall grass and the occasional bunch of clover or dandelions, with no invasive species around to crash the party. What I discover, though, is that the feeling I have toward untamed land that is not “mine” varies wildly from the feeling I get when confronted with similarly untamed land that I “own,” that is my responsibility, and that I feel, correctly or not, others look at as an extension of me, or at least of my sensibilities. I realize, too, that alongside an insidious need to conform, fed by the lawn industry and peer pressure, lies an instinctual need to control.

Though part of me appreciates the aesthetic beauty of the wild grass sprouting in the front lawn, another part of me is intimidated by my lack of involvement in the scheme. I can appreciate the beauty of the grass, but the dandelions have to go. I pull on one, and when the root gives and I am sent stumbling backwards, feel a sense of accomplishment. I am left reeling on the ground, dandelion in hand, wondering how it is that I arrived in what I thought was a foreign land of mindless orthodoxy.

One afternoon I find on the answering machine a message from a friend. She says she’s seen the state of our yard — it looks horrible, do I need help with it? She is only half joking. Her message leaves me wondering, again, at the power turf holds sway over us. In turn I decide that though I, too, am victim of the impulse to mow, weed and generally exert my power over the non-human world, I would do good to let the controlling impulse fall by the wayside for a while. There are practical reasons for this: less fertilizer to choke water systems, fewer pesticides manufactured and ingested, less greenhouse gases burped into the atmosphere.

But the reason I want to let go is more a feeling than a practical, bulleted point. The best way I can describe it is this: One Sunday morning, I look out the first floor window and see various species of soft grass keeping what seems to me a holy rhythm with a record I am listening to. I recall an essay by Terry Tempest Williams in which she suggests that, in lieu of designating large areas of wilderness as national parks, we designate them as stages on which artists (trees, rivers, mayflies) are free to perform. Watching the grass, I am able to better appreciate her suggestion, and decide to relinquish control to that which unfurls seeds in an endless performance of grace. §