"It's our most common landscaping feature and a source of pride for many of us. The ultimate goal is a perfect weed free lawn. A dandelion or two is an indication the owner is negligent and lazy."
:A recent issue of Newsweek brought the news, indirectly conveyed, that this cult remains vividly alive. In April, Pete Barthelme wrote one of those self-celebrating stories about moving away from the pressures of urban civilization to an isolated place in the country, in his case a coastal fishing area in Texas. He told us he's now isolated from movie houses, he gets one TV channel intermittently, the grocery store is four miles away, there are no neighbours for half a mile, and he's happy. But then, inadvertently, he slips in the fact that he has a lawn. In his old life he employed a lawn crew, but he's now replaced them with "a very fine riding lawn mower with a full 11.5 horsepower, which happens to be fun to use." He doesn't tell us why, in the middle of nowhere, he maintains a lawn. He doesn't imagine that the question would occur to us. He knows that even among those who abandon urbanism and "go back" to nature, the lawn remains a necessity. Without it, they would feel incomplete."

"But what is a lawn really?"



"In most cases it is a uniform growth of non-native grasses. Its a source of pollution, (fertilizers, pesticides, lawnmower exhaust....) and represents habitat that has been lost.”
–Robert Fulford
--http://forums.techguy.org/random-discussion/129884-lawn
-north-americas-magnificent-obsession.html

Perhaps nothing illustrates more universally our need to conform, to be socially correct, to fit in–nothing illustrates it more than our deliberately cloned lawns. Vermont, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona, Minnesota: all lawns look the same, slight variations on a theme, a theme composed by someone in England, centuries ago.

In this land of “individualism” our lawns belie our proud claim; we dare not do anything different. Not even Sinatra, Presley, or Paul Anka (who originally wrote the lyrics) “did it [his] way.” They each had a team of hired lawn-keepers who did it the American Way, which is the English Way.

Artificial, heavy consumer of our rapidly depleting aquifers, repository of fertilizer and pesticide chemicals that run off into and pollute our water systems, Saturday sound polluter and air polluter, by many it is a dreaded “necessary” Saturday chore: the lawn.

But why do I waste blog space on this? Such knowledge is widespread, and has been since Silent Spring, and Sand County Almanac, yet less than .01 percent of us have made any change at all. I am Don Quixote, tilting at windmills; our society will never change. Or is that too cynical?

Our society has changed radically, dramatically, traumatically, since 1960. Prior to the election of JFK, ninety-percent of all adult men wore hats when out-of-doors. Now, maybe 5 percent do. Nuns wore habits, business men were clean-shaven, wore white shirts and neckties, hair trimmed neatly short, and shoes polished. Now, even ministers may be found in blue jeans, sandals, and T-shirts, faces bewhiskered and hair cut to every length or perhaps shaven. Societies can change. The traditional lawn could shrink to a relatively small total acreage nationally. At present, lawns occupy 25,600,000 acres of national landscape.

Do I think this blog is going to change things? No, not really. Yes, significantly. Something changed me and caused me to shrink the area that I mow by 85 percent, and I don’t water that. And yes, I’ve been told that my yard is a disgrace to the neighborhood. The point is, I changed, and I believe that one of you readers will begin to consider the same. One by one until someday a critical mass is formed. Read The Tipping Point, and see how it happens.

Meanwhile, back in the real world and Robert Fulford:

"What I mean by the lawn as moral issue is its place in human relations and its role in public shaming. In North America today, a lawn is the quickest, surest indicator that the deadliest of the seven deadly sins has attacked from within. As the death of a canary announces the presence of gas in a mine, so a dandelion's appearance on a lawn indicates that Sloth has taken up residence in paradise and is about to spread evil in every direction. And when a whole lawn comes alive with dandelions--it can happen overnight, as many know to our sorrow--then that property instantly becomes an affront to the street and to the middle-class world of which the street is a part. Pretty as they might look to some, dandelions demonstrate a weakness of the soul. They announce that the owner of the house refuses to respect the neighbourhood's right to peace, order, good government, and the absence of airborne dandelion seeds.

Perhaps nothing illustrates more universally our need to conform, to be socially correct, to fit in–nothing illustrates it more than our deliberately cloned lawns. Vermont, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona, Minnesota: all lawns look the same, slight variations on a theme, a theme composed by someone in England, centuries ago.

In this land of “individualism” our lawns belie our proud claim; we dare not do anything different. Not even Sinatra, Presley, or Paul Anka (who originally wrote the lyrics) “did it [his] way.” They each had a team of hired lawn-keepers who did it the American Way, which is the English Way.

Artificial, heavy consumer of our rapidly depleting aquifers, repository of fertilizer and pesticide chemicals that run off into and pollute our water systems, Saturday sound polluter and air polluter, by many it is a dreaded “necessary” Saturday chore: the lawn.

But why do I waste blog space on this? Such knowledge is widespread, and has been since Silent Spring, and Sand County Almanac, yet less than .01 percent of us have made any change at all. I am Don Quixote, tilting at windmills; our society will never change. Or is that too cynical?

Our society has changed radically, dramatically, traumatically, since 1960. Prior to the election of JFK, ninety-percent of all adult men wore hats when out-of-doors. Now, maybe five percent do. Nuns wore habits, business men were clean-shaven, wore white shirts and neckties, hair trimmed neatly short, and shoes polished. Now, even ministers may be found in blue jeans, sandals, and t-shirts, faces bewhiskered and hair cut to every length or perhaps shaven. Societies can change. The traditional lawn could shrink to a relatively small total acreage nationally. At present, lawns occupy 25,600,000 acres of national landscape.

Do I think this blog is going to change things? No, not really. Yes, significantly. Something changed me and caused me to shrink the area that I mow by eighty-five percent, and I don’t water that. And yes, I’ve been told that my yard is a disgrace to the neighborhood. The point is, I changed, and I believe that one of you readers will begin to consider the same. One by one until someday a critical mass is formed. Read The Tipping Point, and see how it happens.

Meanwhile, back in the real world and Robert Fulford:

"What I mean by the lawn as moral issue is its place in human relations and its role in public shaming. In North America today, a lawn is the quickest, surest indicator that the deadliest of the seven deadly sins has attacked from within. As the death of a canary announces the presence of gas in a mine, so a dandelion's appearance on a lawn indicates that Sloth has taken up residence in paradise and is about to spread evil in every direction. And when a whole lawn comes alive with dandelions--it can happen overnight, as many know to our sorrow--then that property instantly becomes an affront to the street and to the middle-class world of which the street is a part. Pretty as they might look to some, dandelions demonstrate a weakness of the soul. They announce that the owner of the house refuses to respect the neighbourhood's right to peace, order, good government, and the absence of airborne dandelion seeds."