Let us consider Bernard Robinson`s lawn.
It is green. Did I say green? I mean the richest shade of green imaginable, an emerald swath of pure Merion bluegrass across the front yard and parkways of his home in the Pill Hill neighborhood on the South Side.
It is the ultimate in verdancy, the epitome of chlorophyll. It is the green of money. It is the green of envy.
It is thick. The grass blades stand at attention, as if daring a weed to find a place to root. None has done so.
It is cut cleanly and precisely to a uniform height. It is edged to within an inch of its life. It is lawn perfection itself.
Perhaps you know people with lawns like Bernard Robinson`s. Perhaps you hate them. Perhaps you, personally, have Lawn Problems.
Many of us preside sadly over pitiful quilts of barren earth, thick layers of thatch, creeping Charley, dandelions, violets, clover and the occasional advertisement for pizza delivery.
We have vindictive lawns, rewarding our desperate attempts to improve them by sending up weedy shoots here and there with the tensile strength of titanium, requiring us to follow every mowing with heavy-duty shears and re-cut the entire lawn by hand.
Every summer, we confront the horror that we call lawn, and the suspicion that we personally are driving down an entire neighborhood`s property values. ”In this neighborhood, if you didn`t take care of your lawn, you`d be the odd man out,” said Tom Hohenstein, a Chicago firefighter who lives in the Edgebrook neighborhood on the Northwest Side.
But many of us have come to realize that lawns are like cats. They know when you don`t like them, and they take their revenge. You can de-thatch, aerate and fertilize till you are blue in the face, but if you don`t do it with love in your heart, the lawn will still be hideous.
Bernard Robinson, you see, actually enjoys working on his lawn. Robinson, a retired clerk for a manufacturing company, mows twice a week. He fertilizes twice a year. He de-thatches twice a year. He edges. He waters.
He refers to the lawn as ”she.”
He invites a visitor to step on the lovely green stuff. The blades of grass bend down, then immediately, visibly, rise back up.
”If she didn`t spring back, she wouldn`t have enough water,” Robinson says.
His lawn is admired by his neighbors throughout this handsome community, where the afternoon air is filled with the hissing of sprinklers and the drone of mowers.
”I think that guy gets down on his hands and knees and cuts each blade with scissors,” says a respectful Samuel Nolan, the former acting
superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. Nolan, now retired, lives on the next block and tends a mean lawn himself.
”Kids pass by and say, `When I grow up, my lawn is going to be like yours,”` Robinson says.
”I have seen him work out there until he almost drops,” said his wife, Claudelle. ”I have to make him come inside.”
He is so fastidious that he refused to allow the Tribune to photograph his yard because his hedges were not trimmed to his satisfaction, a flaw that might be visible with the aid of an electron microscope.
Medieval roots
Why do we lavish such time and affection on what is, essentially, a foreign and unnatural phenomenon?
And lavish we do-otherwise how to explain the landscaper in Santa Barbara, Calif., who has begun painting browned-out lawns green?
Santa Barbara has banned lawn sprinkling because of a water shortage. Indeed, water shortages have begun to pose major challenges to lawn perfectionists in various parts of the country.
And Illinois lawnmeisters will have something else to worry about beginning July 1, at which point they will no longer be allowed to add lawn clippings and other yard waste to garbage bags headed for overtaxed landfills. Frankly, we Americans were not meant to have lawns. Lawns originated within the medieval castles and on the country estates of England, where they were pampered by cool, rainy summers, mild winters and flocks of servants.
In the U.S., lawns began as a suburban phenomenon. Wealthy urbanites in the 18th and early 19th Centuries built row houses without yards. It was not until Americans began moving out of the cities in the latter half of the 19th Century that houses began to be built with lawns.
Front lawns are essentially public spaces, slices of community parks maintained by homeowners, according to Rutgers University historian Robert Fishman in his book on suburbs, ”Bourgeois Utopias.”
”Not surprisingly, lawn maintenance is considered a civic duty at least as important as any other form of morality,” Fishman wrote.
Indeed, most municipalities have ordinances forbidding homeowners from allowing their grass to grow beyond a certain height.
And the occasional attempt at diversification beyond grass is not always welcomed by neighbors. In Evanston, for example, controversy has erupted over some residents` practice of replacing the grass in their parkways with flowers.
Three Evanston residents last summer complained to the city council`s Administration and Public Works Committee that parkway plantings can block motorists` views and are ugly besides.
”Do we wish to project a trashy unkempt image or a dignified, well-groomed one?” their letter read. ”Browning foliage, dead seed heads, stakes and peony hoops do not enhance our vistas.”
”Their idea of a suburb is grass and trees and nothing else,” said Nora Lloyd, an orthopedic surgery video photographer who has planted her parkway with flowers.
Lloyd was one of six homeowners advised by the city in April to move tall parkway plants. The city is currently formulating a policy on parkway plantings.
Another of the six was Virginia Beatty, a horticulturalist who hosts a gardening advice show on WBBM-AM. She began replacing her parkway grass 22 years ago when she found it was dying from winter road salt, year-round dog droppings and the occasional car accidentally driving up on the grass.
She figures she now has between 200 and 300 plants in her parkway, without the environmental harm of a lawn.
”I don`t use any water,” she said. ”I don`t fertilize or use any herbicides, so I`m not contributing to putrefaction of Lake Michigan.”
The heartbreak of weeds
There are vast differences in people`s lawn psychology. Take weeds-please.
”When I see a weed, it breaks my heart,” Tom Hohenstein said.
”If you`ve got a lawn that`s all full of weeds and brown spots, why have it?” said Elmer Weber, who raises a particularly luscious crop of Kentucky bluegrass around his home near Hohenstein`s. ”You might as well put in Astroturf.”
”If you notice,” said Weber, a retired manufacturing plant manager, ”I don`t have a single weed, a single piece of clover.” You notice.
Jim Schuster, on the other hand, likes weeds. ”Dandelions don`t bother me. I think they look pretty,” he said. ”And a lot of people in my neighborhood feel the same.”
This attitude gives Schuster, horticulture adviser for the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension in Du Page County, a lot more spare time.
He also lets the lawn go dormant and brown in the summer. ”I think it`s a waste of water to be watering a lawn,” he said.
Putt it here
At the other end of the turf universe is the lawn of Bob and Marcia Coleman in River Forest.
It is a putting green. It is nearly one acre of pure creeping bent grass,the stuff of golf courses, mowed nearly flat, looking eerily like green velvet.
”We have people getting out of their cars and touching it,” said Marcia Coleman.
”Sometimes we`ve had people stop their cars, get out and take off their shoes,” said Bob Coleman, a lawyer.
Does it require special care? Heck, you practically have to read it a bedtime story every night.
It must be watered every night, and only at night.
”If it is watered in direct sunlight, the water acts as a magnifying glass, and the sun will burn it out,” Coleman said.
And not just any time of night. Between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., if you please. ”You don`t want it sitting wet overnight,” Coleman explained. ”It is subject to fungus and molds.”
If it is not watered, it will not go dormant like bluegrass. It will die. So urgent is this lawn`s need for water that the Colemans got an exemption from River Forest`s sprinkling restrictions during the drought of 1988.
The Colemans did not choose this particular type of lawn. It was installed when the house was built some 60 years ago by a wealthy banker, Coleman said, and was still there when the Colemans bought the house five years ago. They had to either accommodate its considerable needs, or let it die and plant an entirely new lawn.
”It`s so much the character of the house that we try to maintain it,”
Coleman said.
The Colemans, as you might expect, have a gardener and an automatic underground sprinkling system.
You are your lawn
The perfectly manicured lawn has become the suburban Holy Grail, to be pursued at any cost: $5.6 billion in the U.S. in 1989, according to the National Gardening Association. That works out to $120 a household for the 53 million U.S. households that engage in lawn care.
And that`s only the families that do their own lawn work. Americans spent another $4 billion on professional lawn care in 1988, according to the Professional Lawn Care Association of America.
”I think some people think of their lawns as they may think of their cars . . . as an extension of themselves,” said Dr. Ronald Krasner, a psychiatrist with Northwestern Memorial Hospital`s Institute of Psychiatry.
”Symbolically, unconsciously, their lawn becomes personally important to them because it is them,” he said.
In addition, some people get satisfaction out of being able to shape and control a lawn in a way they cannot control events in the world around them, he added.
”This is my piece of the world,” said John Phelan, a health care insurance manager who lives on the North Side, gesturing toward his 400 square feet of front lawn.
”I should be living in the forest. This is all I`ve got left.”
He said he enjoys pacing his land, and figures it looks less odd if he does it behind a lawn mower.
On the other hand, Nancy Huddlestun sees an urban lawn as an endless, and mostly losing, battle.
”A number of us who have children just kind of give up our lawns,” said Huddlestun, a medical liability underwriter who lives in the Edgewater neighborhood on the North Side.
Her front lawn has become a softball, kickball and soccer field, not to mention sprinkler play area, for her two children and many of their friends.
The Huddlestuns try their best with the back lawn. They drain and disassemble their pool every few days to avoid killing the grass beneath. Every two weeks, they pick up and move their entire swing set so the grass doesn`t die where the children drag their feet.
”It`s a constant rotating of the children,” she said.
Dr. Ignacio Solis, a physician from the Northwest Side who was Chicago`s 1989 Gardener of the Year, also thinks of children when he thinks of grass.
Growing a nice lawn is ”like nursing a baby and watching it grow up,”
said Solis, who credits neighbor Elmer Weber with being his personal lawn-care inspiration.
”It`s like having a beautiful Oriental rug around the house,” he said.
”I have a beautiful home. I have a beautiful rug. You put out your chair and enjoy it.”
