Why Grass?

The front lawn, and grass as a ground cover in general, has become so ubiquitous and normalized in North American suburban landscapes, it’s hard to imagine communities without it. Whether a sprawling swanky neighbourhood, an urban apartment complex, schoolyard, or stretch of highway, the surrounding area tends to feature grass. Much like the brick, mortar, and timber used to construct houses or the concrete that comprises our roads and sidewalks, green grass is a presumed and prominent part of the everyday environment. But this turfy terrain has not always been so dominant, and there is evidence to indicate our preoccupation with grass is dissipating. Cheap to install, but costly and time-consuming, not to mention noisy to maintain, grass is a non-native species that hogs resources like water and — thinking in terms of its opportunity cost — could be replaced with plants, gardens, or other flora that actually benefit the environment and the humans that live there.

With so many marks against it, how did grass become such a community bedrock, spanning and uniting spaces across North America? Why do people spend so many hours tending to a plant that gives little in return? And why is it difficult to break this bond we have with it?

Grass makes up the majority of front yards, but is also used in parks, golf courses, and other spaces. Photo by J. Kau on Unsplash

The single-family detached house surrounded by grass is a North American aesthetic ideal that was sparked in the late 1700s, took hold in the 19th century and reached a peak in the post-war suburban surge of the 1950s and 60s. The original concept of the lawn was imported to the United States and Canada by North European settlers, especially those from England, who brought landscape design and grass seed varieties to their new home. Here, as in Europe, at first only the wealthy had the time or money to cultivate a well-manicured lawn that was purely decorative. Its low profile was achieved mostly by grazing sheep and goats, but eventually by hired help who took to it with scythes. Given the time period, enslaved people were likely tasked with this maintenance as well. In these early days, the lawn was a rural phenomenon, and one confined to the mostly, white upper classes, giving the lawn a baked-in connotation of status and privilege (see more about the lawn's early history at Planet Natural or read Virginia Scott Jenkins' fascinating chronicle in The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession).

Meanwhile, as the grassy verdure made its mark in high-end residential landscape design, working-class property owners could not afford to be so frivolous with their land plots; most people continued to use their front yards pragmatically for animal pasture, gardening, or socializing. The division created by the growing appeal of an ornamental grass lawn that was inoperative yet costly to maintain disclosed cultural and class distinctions. Having a front lawn quite clearly announced your status, much like your style of clothing or vernacular did. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for example, exhalted the singular home surrounded by a trim, tidy lawn at their respective estates, and postcards and illustrations of these would have been widely circulated, modelling landscape design ideals, according to Jenkins.

iStock.com / 19th century illustration of Mt. Vernon. The former plantation estate and burial place of George Washington featured large stretches of trimmed grass in the fashion of English estates and provided a landscape design model to U.S. homeowners.

In subsequent decades, supported by factors including the popularity of golf, the public park movement, advances in lawn care technologies, and home and gardening magazines, the grass lawn ideal further rooted itself in the American psyche as a hallmark of achievement, civility, and status. By the early to mid-1900s, a well-manicured lawn became possible for a wider, middle-class population and a signal homeowners could send to neighbours that they were conscientious, collegial, and prosperous. Especially in the post-war fifties, with an influx of WWII veterans seeking affordable housing, increased car ownership, and expanding public transportation, local governments facilitated residential growth to the less populated areas outside city borders, thereby creating the artery of suburban neighbourhoods still lived in and popular today.

Burgeoning post-war suburbia manifested the dream of home ownership for the middle-class, and the foundation of this cultural fantasy was literally a plot of green turf that was to be managed and maintained to uphold community standards and conformity. A manicured lawn is part of the social contract of living together in a suburban neighbourhood: keep your lawn neat to show you fit in and play nicely with others. When it comes to living peacefully in suburbia, conformity good, independent expression bad.

Nevertheless, grassy tides started to turn in the 1970s, gaining momentum in the 21st century as people learned more about the detrimental effects of so much grass in places where it didn't belong. Because it is not native to North America and does not naturally thrive in the varying climes, grass is massively irrigated. According to Cristina Milesi, a NASA scientist, in fact, grass is the single largest irrigated crop in the United States. Not only is it steadily thirsty, but it also requires a cocktail of herbicides and pesticides, which ultimately end up in the watershed, and a host of noisy, costly machines to stay trim. Given its many downsides, people were bound to get wise and give grass the boot; however, the billion dollar lawn care industry that grew up around it has a vested interest in keeping homeowners addicted to their lawns.

Furthermore, perhaps due to the intense marketing and inculcation by the lawn care industry, grass has been promoted and sold in such a way that there are deep sentimental and even political associations that keep it mainstream. Think about a song like "Green Green Grass of Home" that equates green grass with the warmth and love we experience with family, arguably even with God. Lawn care commercials and advertising emphasize solid family values underpinning the kempt grass lawn as a means of social conformity.

But given what we now know about grass, is it time to look critically at this everyday suburban staple and question its pertinence in a world hopefully keen to tackle environmental ills and wise to the wiles of neoliberalist marketing and brainwashing?

Pete Seeger, sang about suburban compliance and conformity in his 1963 hit "Little Boxes:" "They are all made out of ticky tack and they all look just the same." 

Even before Covid hit, many people in suburban neighbourhoods like mine were starting to break away from the conventional grass front yard. When my husband and I bought our 1960s home, one of the first things we did was replace half the grass with shrubs and perennial flowers. I would like to say it was because we were beginning to learn about the toll grass was having on the environment; but, quite frankly, we just didn't want to buy a lawnmower and spend time attending to the ridiculous, pointless and fruitless task of lawn maintenance.

We weren't ready to turn the lawn completely over to nature like our neighbours a few doors down had; their front yard is meadow-like and wild, which, 15 years ago, was an anomaly. Today however, this aesthetic is more common (though there are still some community grumblings).

During the pandemic especially, in my neighbourhood and I imagine in others, people have used at least part of the time they had on their hands, to reassess their front yards. Some have planted vegetable gardens, some have ripped up their lawn to grow native species, and at least one neighbour has turned a portion of their private property into a community garden, even offering free weekly permaculture lessons.

These changes in how we view and treat the space in front of our homes I think are here to stay. Will everyone conform to this shift or will there be holdouts who love the tradition and order of a kempt grass lawn? Will they contribute to community strife or foster goodwill and exchange?

Suburbia, Photo by Pierre Metivier / Creative Commons