Why Do We Work
So Hard on Our Lawns?

Gentlemen (and ladies): Start your engines. Soon you will be devoting a few hours a week to that most Sisyphean of leisure-time activities -- mowing the grass.

Lawns of smooth, green grass pit humans against nature in a pitifully lopsided contest. Nature has all the big guns: moles, voles and other obnoxious animals; droughts and floods; insects, viruses and, the coup de grace, weeds. People have a few defensive weapons: sprinklers, lawn-care services, weed wackers, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer. Nature always wins. Left untended long enough, most patches of American grass eventually will revert to forest. And if a scrap of the great outdoors is occasionally subjugated, the cost to its minders can be astronomical.

Somehow, though, America became a major player in the global lawn-care industry. Why would a nation of farmers, who struggled for centuries to wring the barest living from the soil, start fussing over inedible vegetation that would rather die than live? As usual, the answer is a combination of habit, snobbery, capitalism and government intervention.

The English brought the concept of mown grass to the U.S., and they imported the earliest grass seed. Pastures of grass fed cows and sheep, and they looked nice, too. But since much of eastern America was wooded, pastures had to be painstakingly cleared, and then they tended to be weedy. Grass was trimmed either by scythes or grazing animals, so fields also were full of ruts. And there was no water except what fell from the sky because water hauled from a well or stream couldn't be wasted.

Despite their love of democracy, the early Americans also brought from England an aristocratic notion of beauty. John Loudon, considered by some to be the father of modern gardening, decreed that the mansions of tasteful 19th-century English gentlemen should be generously encircled by "the smoothness of green turf." The property -- no less than 50 acres -- should be created, he said, with "a view to recreation and enjoyment, more than profit."

Fortunately, and not coincidentally, manual labor was cheap in England at the time. In the New World, though, there was little labor to be spared for beautification. Vegetation either earned its keep or it was regarded as the enemy. In the South, "many people cleared their yards of grass to keep mosquitoes, rodents, snakes and brush fires away from the house," notes Virginia Scott Jenkins in her book "The Lawn."

Even in the nation's growing cities, little attention was paid to the yard. Houses sat close to the streets, and the unseen backyards were used as vegetable gardens, junkyards or, often, both.

Only with the birth of the suburb could Americans finally realize the ideal of carpeting a buffer zone between themselves and the rest of the world. The lawn was essentially decorative fringe: Its value arose partly from its impracticality. Thorsten Veblen noted in his 1899 book, "The Theory of the Leisure Class," that grazing animals had been banished from yards because they gave "the vulgar suggestion of thrift."

Nor did homeowners need animals any longer to keep their lawns trimmed. In 1830, an English textile maker, who grasped the analogy between the nap of velvet and pastureland, patented a rotary mower. In his patent application, Edwin Budding asserted -- apparently seriously -- that users would find his machine "an amusing, useful and healthful exercise," even though a gardener's journal described the first machines as "cumbrous heavy things that made a maximum of ear-torturing sound and entailed severe labor to work." Nonetheless, by 1897 the Sears Roebuck catalog offered three different models of lawn mowers. The first American water sprinkler had been patented in 1871.

There also were informal economic and cultural compacts among the new suburbanites that advanced the cause of open expanses of lawn. Landscape architects like Frank Jessup Scott, author of the 1870 book "The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds," discouraged fences, walls and other private borders. "It is unchristian to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature," Mr. Scott wrote. "Let your lawn be your home's velvet robe." Not to mow, the magazine "Better Homes and Gardens" argued later, "is to attack one's neighbors."

In the early 20th century, the federal government weighed in on the topic of lawns. Frank Lamson-Scribner, a senior agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, declared that nothing "more strongly bespeaks the character" of a homeowner than his lawn. He urged all Americans to agree on a single variety of grass with a smooth, even surface and uniform color. Such a lawn "carries with it the idea of richness represented by costly garments," he said.

Today, many municipalities have adopted legal ordinances requiring homeowners to keep their lawns trim and free of weeds. But as human beings have recognized for centuries, "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."

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