The sheer perversity of lawns hits you on the hottest days. You’re on your knees, a pebble poking into one of them, sweat trickling down your neck as you struggle with a dandelion. It has just broken off in your hand, its roots robust and intact in the hard soil.
Your eyes travel to the sea of dandelions all around you. They are cheerful. They flourish. Each has a root system exactly like the one you just failed to remove. Your neighbors have suggested you do something about them.
Meanwhile, just over there is a patch of weed whose name you have never learned. It started small and has now spread to huge sections of your yard. Unlike the dandelion’s root, which is merely stubborn, this one’s is ingenious. Every weed is connected to others by a network of underground, oh, let’s call them cables, because they might as well be. The cables, broken when you pull out a piece of this weed, branch off and send up two or three new shoots in place of the one.
There is also crabgrass. There are surfacing tree roots. There are patches of bare dirt. What there isn’t, much, is grass. Everything that wants to be there, you’re removing. The one thing that doesn’t, you’re begging to stay.
And you think, “Why must there be grass?”
You are right to wonder. Grass is a strange crop. We grow it not to eat or to wear but to cut and throw away. It is nature at its least natural.
Environmentalists have long seen lawns as ecological minefields, and their concerns are starting to rouse the population at large.
Earlier this month, an environmental group petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the use of atrazine, a weedkiller often used on lawns in the southeast U.S., saying the chemical has been linked to deformities in frogs and prostate cancer in humans.
The EPA has been drafting new rules for the use of the herbicide (which is already banned in France, Germany and Italy), and is expected to issue any changes late this summer. Residential lawns cover more than 20 million acres in the United States, and guzzle about half the available drinking water in some cities, even as water shortages are reaching a crisis point. With wells running dry from Maui to Atlanta, new local ordinances place restrictions on lawn watering while xeriscaping, “dry” landscaping that uses deep-rooted native plants, rocks, and other unthirsty materials, is being encouraged.
The pesticides sprinkled and sprayed on lawns, many suspected of causing long-term health problems for humans, pets and wildlife, are another serious concern.
The EPA estimates that residential application of pesticides is typically 20 times greater, per acre, than farm application. According to an EPA task group on landscaping, U.S. homeowners apply 67 million pounds of lawn chemicals every year; much of that comes in the form of weed-and-feed products.
For the love of grass
And what about those gas-happy power mowers? Air pollution created by operating one for an hour is about the same as an automobile produces on a 350-mile trip. The clippings those mowers produce? Huge quantities of them still end up in landfills, making up about 20 percent of the solid waste collected in some cities. Justifying our love for green, manicured grass is getting harder and harder. But it’s not an easy habit to break.
Christy Webber, a landscaper who specializes in urban settings and has done a number of projects for the Chicago Park District, encounters lawn loyalists regularly in her work. “I cannot tell you how people are about their grass,” she says. “It’s amazing. We’ve done tons of huge trees in Millennium Park, just unbelievable stuff there. The project manager, my boss, will walk out and say, `There are weeds in the grass. We need to get that taken care of.’ He won’t look at anything else. I’m blown away. I think grass is a man thing.”
Ron Nowicki, who with his wife, Vicki, owns the Land Office, a natural landscaping service in Downers Grove, has spent a lot of time thinking about why grass is so popular. He always comes back to: It’s easy. “It doesn’t take any knowledge of the natural world to have a lawn,” he says. “It’s like having a carpet.”
(The Nowickis, by the way, do not have a lawn; they consider it “a weed.” More on that later.)
Lawn histroy
The lawns that strike many Americans as an inalienable right are, in fact, a European import, a taste brought over by early settlers who wanted to make the untamed New World feel more civilized. The seeds were brought over, too; the turf grasses used in U.S. lawns are not native to this continent. In the old country, lawns date back to the 18th Century, when French and English aristocrats surrounded their houses with manicured grass, kept under control by scythe-wielding servants and picturesque herds of grazing animals. In England, especially, a moist climate and moderate temperatures kept the greenswards green. Not until after the Civil War in this country, when mechanical mowers first appeared, did the idea of a lawn surrounding every dwelling take hold. Before then, your house might come right up to the street or have a small garden plot in front of it.
In the decades that followed, according to Virginia Scott Jenkins in “The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession,” it was the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Golf Association, and the Garden Clubs of America that got the ball rolling, sponsoring landscaping competitions and planting the idea that if your neighbor has a nice green lawn, you should, too.
It worked: Grass is everywhere. Mowed lawn fills spaces where rain rarely falls, where sun rarely shines, as well as where both occur in abundance. We try to grow it in Florida, in the desert, and on highway embankments. It’s the crop of choice for the gleaming lawns of suburbia and the scrubbiest patches of urban parkway.
A family tradition
The omnipresence of lawns is a matter of habit as much as taste. We have grass because our parents had it and because our neighbors have it. And because, even disdainers of grass agree, it has its virtues. While some homeowners hold fast to the aesthetic of green flawlessness and will do anything to achieve that look, many have made peace with imperfection.
“I enjoy grass immensely,” says Armando Pagnucci, a Sauganash resident and owner of a graphic arts company. “It feels good to walk on it. It is high maintenance but it isn’t that high. Some people put too much effort into it. They want to have a perfect lawn. My lawn is not perfect, but it is nice and green and we walk on it. My relatives, when they come to the United States, are enamored of our front lawns. That just doesn’t exist in Europe. They don’t have that luxury.”
Pagnucci hires a service to maintain the lawn surrounding his house but takes care of two acres’ worth at his second home in Wisconsin, using a John Deere rider mower that cuts a 50-inch swath.
He points out that he started liking grass when power mowers came along: “I hated grass when I was growing up. I had to cut it with a push-type mower. But I survived. I got over it.” He says his father was one of the first people in the neighborhood — now called South Lakeview — to put a lawn in the parkway. “Everybody else, it was just dirt. And all of a sudden people followed suit. Grass has been part of our family for a long time.”
Dad was `fanatic’
Glenn Magnus, an ironworker who lives in Skokie, says grass has been part of his family for a long time, too. “My dad was kind of a fanatic about it,” he says. “He liked to take care of his lawn. It always had to look real good — edging every week. I do edging about once a year. I try to keep it trimmed so it looks half decent.”
He observes that the male-rite-of-passage aspect seems to be fading in his family. His teenage son helps “if I catch him at the right time,” he says. “I’m not a fanatic about it. If my grass is green and not completely overgrown and doesn’t have a million dandelions, I’m happy.” Magnus’ house sits on land that, long ago, was a chicken farm, and he says the natural fertilization that took place back then still keeps his grass growing strong. “Anything we put in here grows,” he says. “We have a new dog who runs 90 miles an hour through the grass. He loves it. Loves playing in it, rubbing his back in it. Now there’s a grass lover.”
Magnus’ one ambitious grass project in recent years involved low-maintenance zoysia grass. “You buy these plugs of grass, roots or whatever,” he recalls. “You punch a hole in the ground, stick this plug in, stomp it down a little, and it grows grass that you never have to take care of, supposedly. I bought 1,000 of these plugs, and my son and I put in about five rows of it; the rest sat in the garage for years. It’s the one thing that didn’t grow here. That was a definite failure, though I’ve seen lawns that have it and it does really work.” He says he doesn’t care about having a picture-perfect lawn. “It’s green,” he says. “I take care of it and I keep up with the neighbors; otherwise they’ll yell at me.”
A lawn-lover
Bob Black, a medical salesman who lives in Park Ridge, is more enthusiastic about grass, calls a well-kept lawn “a gorgeous sight” and himself “definitely” a lawn-lover. His corner house is surrounded by smooth turf, shrubs, and mulched perennial gardens with periwinkle filling in the empty spaces. An avid golfer, he says a lot of what he has learned about lawn care came from watching how golf courses are tended.
He edges and fertilizes his grass yearly, aerates it every other year, cuts it weekly during the growing season with a mulching mower, and waters it frequently.
“In the summer if you want to maintain a beautiful green lawn, you have to water it,” Black says. “That presents a problem if you have watering restrictions. In our suburb if your street address is an even number you can water on even days; if it’s odd, on odd days.” He points out that “it’s sort of unfair for the people on the even side of the street” when a month has 31 days and they can’t water between the 30th and the 2nd.
Obviously while to some people grooming a lawn is a pleasure, or at least no big deal, to others it feels tyrannical, as if we were all forced to keep poodles. It’s the same unspoken but real pressure as the one that calls for shoveling snow off your sidewalk edge to edge, rather than just clearing a serviceable path down the middle. The pull to do what your neighbors do is powerful.
Black says a prairie look “wouldn’t go over real well” on his street, though how he personally would feel if his next-door neighbor replaced his lawn with natural landscaping would depend on how well it was maintained. “If you have an entire block of lawn and then one plot in the middle that has something different, it sort of breaks up the look of the street,” he says. If a neighbor in Sauganash replaced his grass with prairie plants, Pagnucci says, laughing, “We’d have a recall. We’d buy him out.”
There are excellent reasons for some people to have some grass, proponents of natural landscaping say, but it’s cultural norms rather than pure practicality that make turf lawns seem necessary. Ron and Vicki Nowicki encourage their clients to think about increasing biodiversity, and their landscape designs minimize consumption of gas, electricity and water.”
Grass is a nice place to put the kids’ inflatable pool or to stretch out and have a picnic or play badminton or even soccer,” Ron says. “But people have more lawn than they need for those kinds of activities.”
And watering it to keep it green all season goes against the natural course of things. Most people in the Chicago area grow Kentucky bluegrass, a cool-season grass that dries out in the summer and normally goes dormant then. Like all turf grasses, its roots are short, maybe three inches. In native prairie plants, roots will go down anywhere from two to seven feet, depending on the species. “In the middle of summer, when all our neighbors’ lawns are brown,” Ron says, “our native prairie patch is blooming, lush and verdant and alive with insects.”
Lawns do differ
The Nowickis live in a 3,000-square-foot solar home with a vegetable garden and natural landscaping. They do not have a lawn. “We consider Kentucky bluegrass a weed,” Ron says. “We pull it when we see it.”
Horticultural habits vary from community to community. In woodsy suburbs and in the city neighborhoods of Lincoln Park and Hyde Park, for example, many shady front yards have long hosted low-growing ground covers, perennials and ornamental grasses instead of turf. And in other sections of the city, things might be changing. Where once only grass would fly in a front yard, homeowners are now considering the alternatives. Christy Webber thinks the city’s recent installation of median planters and other garden projects have given people ideas. “It is infectious,” she says. “It has affected every single neighborhood. Everyone is going out and planting flowers now. It makes them less mean.”
But Webber says she still frequently runs into lawn mania when she’s working on private homes. “I will do $10,000 worth of perennial plantings in a back yard, hardscaping, we’ll have everything in place, and the husband will come out and say, `Ok, when are you putting the sod down?’ That’ll be the only question. It is a male thing, through and through. Wives will come out and whisper, `For God’s sake, can you get the grass down so I can get my husband off my back?’ “Honestly. People really love to have grass. It’s the American dream — a lawn.”
Some tips on going natural
The following is from “How to Naturally Landscape Without Aggravating Neighbors and Village Officials,” by Bret Rappaport, president of Wild Ones, a Milwaukee-based group for natural landscapers (www.epa.gov/glnpo/greenacres/wildones).
1. Humans will accept something that looks as if it is intended, while they will reject the very same thing if it looks unintended. Put a border around your natural landscape to show it’s a product of intent and effort, not neglect. The border can be a lawn, hedge, fence, path or series of low plants; it doesn’t matter.
2. Remember that just as you have a right to your coneflowers, your neighbor has a right to his clipped lawns. Nothing repulses more than arrogance. Don’t be self-righteous.
3. Before you tear up your lawn and naturally landscape your yard, tell your neighbors what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
4. Start small. No one wants an entirely naturally landscaped yard, edge to edge, to spring up overnight.
5. Humanize your landscape with a path, bench, sundial, bird feeder or other artifact.
