Lawn-Be-Gone: Rethinking the American Turf
07.15.22
“We have the most beautiful lawn in the neighborhood, and we’ve already poisoned 14 people.” –Art Buchwald, American humorist
In July 1990, famed Golden Age actor Richard Widmark was mowing his forty-acre spread of Connecticut turf when he nearly lost a leg to the lawnmower. “The question I asked the doctors,” he explained after surgery, “was not, ‘Will I ever act again?’ but ‘Will I ever mow again?’”
Widmark’s romantic devotion to his lawn is unremarkable: for most Americans, it is the only landscape they have ever known. Even today, in the wake of such anti-lawn movements as #droughtshaming and “No Lawns” subreddit, 81 percent of Americans maintain a lawn, and new millennial homebuyers ranked “a nice size lawn” as their number one priority when searching for a house.
No surprise then, that the lawn is one of America’s leading “crops,” and covers 1.9% of the continental US, guzzling through 30 percent of drinking water in the eastern United States and nearly 60 percent in the West. “The rise of the lawn to dominance in suburbia represents one of the most profound transformations of the landscape in American history,” writes environmental historian Ted Steinberg. “If it does not quite rival in its scale the Great Plow Up of the Southern Plains that precipitated the Dust Bowl or the massive deforestation of the Midwest and South during the nineteenth century, then it is at least not far behind.”
The dominance of the lawn is remarkable, given the vast amount of coordination, education, and homogenization needed to transform regional landscapes — formerly based on local vegetation and climate — into one monolithic lawn. As Paul Williams, former CEO of Scotts Miracle-Grow Company once acknowledged, “In few areas is ‘consumer demand’ so missing as in lawn products. The hard fact is that we want the consumer to buy a product that is also a work project — one that may keep him away from TV, a ballgame or even golf.”
How, then, did Scotts succeed? This week, we discuss how — against all odds — a set of non-native plants that need “more coddling than a toddler” came to be the basis for our national landscape.
Why Lawns?
“Some people hoist a flag to show they love their country. Well, my lawn is my flag. It tells the world, “Here lives a competent and trustworthy salesman of propane and propane accessories.” A man who can’t keep up a lawn is either inept or stupid.”
Hank Hill, King of the Hill, 1997
The greening of America was not an inevitable development. Early Americans — with the exception of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — did not maintain meticulous yards because the process of mowing required too much labor. Jefferson and Washington borrowed the aesthetic from European aristocracy, who displayed the lawn as a public marker of class privilege.
“The well-trimmed lawns and green meadows of home are not there,” wrote Charles Dickens on a tour of New England in the eighteen-forties. “And the grass, compared with our ornamental plots and pastures, is rank, and rough, and wild.” Indeed, European colonists were forced to import grass species from Africa, Asia, and Europe after livestock chewed through the native grasses, which were not adapted to grazing.
Things changed with the modernization of the lawn mower (1868) and the invention of the water sprinkler (1871), allowing upper-class households to indulge in the practice. Everyone else, however, kept on gardening. “As late as the nineteen-thirties, working-class suburbanites — struggling to put food on the table — micro-farmed their property, growing fruit and vegetables and raising chickens, geese, and rabbits,” writes Steinberg. As one advice manual from the 1920s warned, “Don’t fancy for a moment that you can have an English lawn in an American climate.”
Only in the 1950s did Scotts — the pioneering firm in the agrochemical industry — conquer the suburbs. Scotts proudly recounts this history in its latest annual report: “In the mid-1900s, we became widely known for the development of quality lawn fertilizers and grass seeds that led to the creation of a new industry — consumer lawn care.” Thanks to the construction of the national highway system and the development of Levittown-like housing developments — each with their own lawn — Scotts was well-primed to give “tens of thousands of Americans a chance to be the lord of their own little manor, even if they had to mow it themselves.”
In conjunction with the creation of some of its most iconic products — Turf Builder, MiracleGro, Clout, etc. — Scotts launched a national marketing campaign to educate its consumers on proper lawn care. It began distributing Lawn Care magazine, a publication one Wall Street analyst referred to as “the greatest advertising gimmick in the business… Most direct mailings are read by a tiny fraction of the people they’re sent to, but Lawn Care, which goes only to people who request it, probably has as high a readership percentage as Time or Life.”
The mass mailings worked. People bought 139,000 mowers in 1946: just thirteen years later, they purchased 4.2 million. Scotts further popularized its products by waging a war against clover, crabgrass, and dandelions. “Here at Scotts,” proclaimed chairman Charles B. Mills, “we refuse to recognize virtue in weeds.” The company designed a seven-step lawn-care program, which made the perfect, monoculture lawn available even to its most talentless lawn keepers.
Lawn zealots responded with enthusiasm: by the late eighties, the average lawn user was using a higher concentration of chemicals than an industrial farmer, and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 70 million pounds of chemicals are applied to lawns each year, increasing by 5 to 8 percent annually. Today, thanks to the coronavirus lockdown, the Scotts company has converted a new generation of lawn enthusiasts: in 2021, net sales increased by 19 percent to a record $4.93 billion.
“The assumedly ideal lawn, it seems, has crew-cut grass, kept neat and clean ‘like a velvet rug’ — and botanically about as interesting,” read one lawn critic’s letter published in the New York Times in 1966. “Any sign of varied plant life there must at once be destroyed, uprooted, killed with exterminators of weeds, ‘weeds’ such as clover, crowfoot, Queen Anne’s lace, dandelion, aster — any of hundreds of varieties of wildflowers of which there mustn’t be a trace on your spotless outdoor carpet or what will the neighbors say?”
The (Slow) Return to Local Lawns
Today, particularly in the parched Western United States, there is a growing movement to end lawn monoculture and reclaim the yard for native plants. “Restoring habitat where we live and work, and to a lesser extent where we farm and graze, will go a long way toward building biological corridors that connect preserved habitat fragments with one another,” writes conservationist Douglas Tallamy. “Across the United States, millions of acres now covered in lawn can be quickly restored to viable habitat by untrained citizens with minimal expense and without any costly changes to infrastructure.”
While some would dispute this claim — meadow lawns, at least initially, require “tremendous effort to keep from looking like a set from a horror movie,” — established meadows are certainly more adapted to regional soil and climate.
By one conservationist’s count, some 23 million Americans have already converted part of their lawn into a natural landscape. However, such trailblazers routinely face harassment, fines, and even jail time from local municipalities and HOAs intent on enforcing neighborhood conformity. Anna Lawrence, a resident of Lookout Creek Canyon in San Antonio, recently tried to remove turf grass from her front yard after receiving a high-water bill, only to have her landscaping plan rejected by her local HOA for too much mulch.
“I am 80 years old this year, handicapped and can’t mow,” Lawrence told the HOA. “Nor can I afford a mowing service as I live on Social Security… I strongly urge you to reconsider your land use policies, given the environmental crisis we are in and the Texas state laws concerning xeriscaping.”
Considering that the United States is home to over 370,000 HOAs (representing 53% of owner-occupied houses) the path to reintroducing clover to the front yard may be fraught with local obstacles. “State legislators should pass laws compelling homeowners associations to repeal landscaping rules requiring blue-grass,” writes Steinberg. “Closer to home, local officials need to cultivate a new generation of weed ordinances … rather than a set of standardized rules that has the lawn police running around with yardsticks.”
Ultimately, however, the creation of new regional landscaping practices requires a tremendous culture shift. Virginia Jenkins, author of The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, hasn’t made her bets yet. “It remains to be seen whether the environmental movement in this country can enlist as potent a group of supporters and teachers for the twenty-first century as the lawn industry, the Garden Club of America, the U.S. Golf Association, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture did during the twentieth century.”
About Colbeck: Colbeck is a strategic lender that partners with companies during periods of transition, providing creative capital solutions to meet their evolving needs. You can reach the team at inquiries@colbeck.com.
