Mowing Up with the Joneses Part III

My mother-in-law Sharon just sent me a link to this blog last week in the Washington Post arguing that we ditch our lawns. It provides even more interesting information about our obsession with lawns and the various kinds of harm that it does. (Mind-blowing fact: more than 20% of the states of New Jersey and Massachusetts is covered in lawn!) Following up on Parts I and II of this series on my own blog, if our desire for a neat, green lawn is the result of history and culture and chasing after prestige, then can it be changed in favor of something that is more environmentally friendly, less dangerous for humans, and easier to keep by homeowners who are already sufficiently busy and stressed?

There are all kinds of substitutes for a green lawn that are beginning to make headlines today. Some people plant gardens in place of lawns. Some people in rural areas let their lawns revert to what they were intended to be, such as woods or a little piece of wetland. Some people grow grass and wildflowers to attract birds and butterflies and other pollinators. Some people grow food forests. It's particularly exciting when businesses on large plots of mowed lawn make a switch. For example, the Audubon Society local chapter to which I belong is now working with the National Humane Education Society in Charles Town, WV, to convert twelve acres of lawn to wildflowers and native grasses.

Will these efforts continue and expand? I predict that they will because they push our prestige button in much the same way that organic food has done: once it became more widely prestigious to eat organic food and shop at farmers markets, and just a little bit more affordable, the movement took off. Now even Walmart attempts to sell mostly organic produce. Such processes trickle down from the wealthy to the Joneses, and then Americans in general begin to aspire to those markers of status. Today there are people taking workshops on growing monarch way stations or planting native species in their backyard. Sales are increasing on books explaining how to grow enough food for one's entire family on one acre of (previous) lawn. People may not be ready to convert their entire lawn into a micro-farm just yet, but lots of them are putting in greenhouses or small gardens.

There are also government efforts afoot in many places. My above-mentioned mother-in-law lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, and the county government is converting a portion of the lawns of neighborhood residents into rain gardens to help capture rainfall that would otherwise carry more pollutants into the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Top-down government solutions such as these are controversial and sometimes create other problems, but they are also a sign that local government policies, which have long been pro-lawn, may be changing.

The key to these efforts, in addition to wrapping them in what I would call "attainable prestige", is changing our aesthetic values. We have to make messiness visually pleasing. The eyes that have been trained by culture to appreciate a neat, green lawn will have to be retrained to love the look of bright wildflowers buzzing with bees and butterflies. The rural landowners who mow all their fields to keep them neat will have to learn to feel good about letting a few of them go to grass and milkweed, knowing that there are grasshopper sparrows and meadowlarks and monarch butterflies thriving because of that decision. And we will all have to stop complaining about that neighbor’s messy yard.

‘Tis the Season

No, not the Christmas season. Campaign season! And with all of the, er, dissatisfaction being expressed these days about the current lineup of politicians vying for office, I thought it would be fun to blog about the forefathers and their campaigns - for nature.

I’m reading a fascinating book entitled Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf (New York: Knopf, 2011). It turns out that, while George Washington was fighting the revolution, he was dreaming about getting home to his garden, making notes about what he would plant, consulting gardening books and catalogs from the continent. Once home at Mt. Vernon in Virginia, he set about designing grounds that reflected the wild natural beauty of the United States rather than the more manicured beauty of the trendy English garden.

Many of the forefathers (including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) were fascinated by plants in terms of their cultivation value and felt the future prosperity of the new country lay in the hands of farmers, a place where, as Washington put it, “our Swords and Spears have given place to the plough share and pruning hook” (16). But Washington found an aesthetic value in plants and trees as well, and he wanted his grounds to express the beauty of American nature. Beginning in 1784, he ordered the following trees from friends around the country: balsam trees and white pines from the Northeast, hemlocks from the East, and live oaks and magnolias from the South (21-22).

He was also interested in native local species, plants that the fashionable set considered weeds: ash trees, pines, cockspur hawthorns, sassafras, crab apples, and flowering dogwoods. Washington liked plants that provided berries during the winter and fragrant blossoms come spring. He experimented with planting times, relying on slaves to dig into the frozen ground in winter and work in the hot sun in spring. But Washington was known to strip off his coat and labor “like a common man” as well, much to the surprise of visitors (27).

Then he turned his attention to his fields, experimenting with organic pesticides such as seaweed and fertilizer in the form of manure and gypsum. Today, I can imagine Washington as that retired guy who moves out to the country to take up farming in his later years, hawking his produce at the local farmers’ market. “Oh, look, General Washington has such nice arugula today!” I can imagine myself saying.

It's clear that Washington wanted to make a political statement with his planting. This new country didn’t need English gardens or English anything else; it needed to turn inward and explore and appreciate its own natural heritage. A general and future president who envisioned his nation’s greatness through trees and flowers - imagine how different our presidential debates would be today if that kind of vision were on the table.