36 ms·

How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America?

108 points by notRobot 5y ago

notRobot 5y ago
TL;DR: Lawns bad.
tsjq 5y ago
HOA !
leoedin 5y ago
Faced with some lawn repair, I once joined the lawncare subreddit. It was an intense echo chamber of lawn adjacent neuroticism - stress over chemicals, mowing heights, quite a few people angry at their neighbours for foolishly trying to do them a favour by cutting some of their grass (inevitably too short or tall), and a fetishisation of the "perfect" lawn - cut short with visible stripes and no other vegetation. I definitely like lawns - they're great for running about on, playing games, having a picnic. But other vegetation is nice too. The beauty of a slightly wild garden is the abundance of nature - insects, birds, the scent of flowers. Lawns are a monoculture with none of that.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  It would be unwise to take Reddit as illustrative about how normal people feel about anything. The platform is designed to falsify the appearance of strong consensus.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    In other words, it's a collection of niche echo chambers of varying size.
    - mlindner 5y ago
      Which is exactly what most people want. They want to find people with similar interests and share ideas. Don't go to the anime subreddit expecting to find anyone who's interested in a negative critique about anime.
      - floatingatoll 5y ago
        That problem with Reddit also applies to HN and every other "moderated with a light hand" discussion forums today. Don't go to Hacker News to speak positively about 'System Integrity Protection' or 'Sealed System Volume' on Apple computers, or to consider how the GPL might be harming open source, for example. The comments will be a tire fire of people repeating the same handful of hostile viewpoints as top-level threads (rather than upvoting that which they agree with), drowning out rational discussion and driving away anyone who doesn't agree with their viewpoint. The conversational warfare tactics are exactly the same as those used on Reddits about anime, video games, and all other topic people feel strongly enough about to create a forum for and allow participation of this nature.
        throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Every up-vote/down-vote based system is just like this. It's all a matter of degrees after that. I miss the forums and BBSs of old.
        bigthymer 5y ago
        Were they structurally different (no voting maybe?), or just had a lot fewer people?
        Karrot_Kream 5y ago
        Structurally different. Take a look at the many Discourse groups around today. There's none of the same pile-on tendencies that Upvote based sites like HN, Reddit, and Lobste.rs has. There's nothing to gain by piling on usually, since there's no karma-with-the-crowd.
        tayo42 5y ago
        this threaded view so much better though. maybe sort by time instead of votes would be better. once you got through a few pages message boards got unreadable
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      More than just an an echo chamber, a pressure cooker designed to ratchet up over time. It rewards extreme opinions, normalizes them, then cyclically rewards even more extreme options that break the new norm.
    - notthemessiah 5y ago
      Imagine what Reddit could have been if they went with tags instead of subcommunities. Posts could have different communities interacting instead of having mutually exclusive circlejerks.
      - jonny_eh 5y ago
        The downside there is spamming tags to every post.
  - coolgeek 5y ago
    > The platform is designed to falsify the appearance of strong consensus The platform is designed to bring people together to discuss common interests - much like HN, and many other sites. Any false appearance of strong consensus is a cognitive error on the observer's part
- goda90 5y ago
  There's also a r/NoLawns subreddit worth checking out.
  - dghughes 5y ago
    Just as extreme but on the other end.
    - matttproud 5y ago
      Reduction ad horseshoe theory absurdum.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  In the Portland metro area for the most part we just let our lawns go brown in the dry summer. It generally doesn't rain much from mid-June through mid-September and now the lawns look tawny like lion fur - I kind of like it, actually. My sister & BiL visted from out of state last week and they were like "why does everyone let their lawns die here?" and I actually hadn't even thought about it much before - the fish doesn't see the water, I guess. I think it's because it's going to cost a lot if you want to keep your lawn green through the summer - mostly sewer costs as they're based on water usage. That and we don't have to worry about mowing in July, August and September which is nice. And we know it won't take much for the lawns to green back up when the rains start in October.
  - notJim 5y ago
    It's also not that common to have a sprinkler system here, and watering the lawn is kind of a PITA, especially if you want to avoid dirty looks for watering the sidewalk.
  - mynameisash 5y ago
    +1 from Seattle. Coming from the Midwest, the brown PNW lawns annoyed me. They still do (it's a dust bowl here for months), but 90% of lawns are dormant like mine. No watering, no mowing, no big deal. When the rain comes back (very soon!), we'll green up and all will be right again.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Does Portland allow dual water meters? Here it’s semi-common to have a meter for outside water, upon which sewer rates are not charged.
    - UncleOxidant 5y ago
      I've never seen this here.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  To be fair, that's every single subreddit that is about a relatively mundane topics. There is only so much to talk about and eventually leads to intense optimization, especially considering the population is going to be full of people who willing look to join a lawn care community. And it should be noted that the name of a subreddit does not necessarily best represent what it is. For the same reason that there are at least 6 different personal finance subreddits I am aware of.
zikduruqe 5y ago
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession-lawns/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession-lawns/ This is a really good podcast.
sjg007 5y ago
For me, its about invasive weeds, mosquitoes, ticks and other non-desireable bugs as well as rodents. But I live near a field! So the lawn serves as a buffer and lawns are very good at suppressing weeds. I could go with clover though which we are cultivating on the small hill next to us to buffer us from the field instead of grass though. A lot of my neighbors have had their lawns overridden by crab grass anyway so is that still a lawn at that point? Having a lawn also is nice for the kids.
- goda90 5y ago
  In my opinion, a lawn should be a space where vegetation covers all of the ground, and is kept under a few inches tall. As long as that's not thistles or poison ivy, then you can play on that all you want. My lawn has all sorts of grasses, clover, dandelions and wood violets in it. I get to see frogs and fireflies in the evening because I don't spray chemicals to kill them off. Mosquitos are inevitable. If you spray for them, you're also killing their predators like spiders and dragonflies, but not their food supply(you) so they bounce back really fast, way before their predators can recover.
  - finiteseries 5y ago
    They live next to a field and mentioned using the lawn as a buffer, twice, in what is assumedly a sort of rural area. Not as the red carpet for a wildlife oasis in paved over suburbia which this sort of advice is inevitably geared towards. You don’t need to spray for mosquitoes and ticks and ruin the local ecosystem when they’re happy in their field at a healthy distance with a nice, clean lawn in between you.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    At least here in the DC area, the natural predators are not up to the task of controlling the mosquitos. We don't spray and we don't have any nearby bodies of standing water and our yards are still unbearable with tiny tiger mosquitos every summer. Luckily, it's also just plain too hot and humid to bother with outside in the summer, so yeah, fuck summer.
- jefflombardjr 5y ago
OldHand2018 5y ago
> Using a gas-powered leaf blower for half an hour creates as many polluting hydrocarbon emissions as driving a car seventy-seven hundred miles at a speed of thirty miles per hour. Battery-powered leaf blowers are so incredibly good that I have a hard time understanding why anyone buys a new gas-powered leaf blower.
- wavefunction 5y ago
  I don't mind plugging mine in (it's corded). I even use it to clean the gutters every fall. Even better than batteries unless you really need that mobility.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I have both. My 80v leaf blower is pretty decent for about 15 minutes, and with two batteries there isnt a ton of downtime. However, we also have three massive cottonwood trees among plenty of other maple and crap that amounts to feet of fallen leaves to clean up. On a whim I got a backpack style gas leaf blower, and now we only use the battery one for "maintenance" blowing. There simply isn't a good analogy to describe the difference. That said, at my previous house in the suburbs, the battery powered one was plenty sufficient, so YMMV.
- dmurray 5y ago
  That aside, "polluting hydrocarbon emissions" is doing a lot of work there. It creates perhaps a thousandth as much CO2, which is the most worrying exhaust pollutant these days.
  - ProfessorLayton 5y ago
    I'd argue the opposite. Gas-powered leaf blowers are insanely pollutant. Running a gas leaf blower for an hour is equivalent to driving a car for 100 miles [1] [1] https://sustainability.wustl.edu/rethinking-lawn-equipment-2/ https://sustainability.wustl.edu/rethinking-lawn-equipment-2...
    - dmurray 5y ago
zdragnar 5y ago
They offer a clear line of sight, look "clean", and keep rodents and other pests at bay. Personally, only about a quarter of my property is grass, and I am amazed at the acres of grass I see in the country, but I don't think I would want less than half an acre's worth around the house otherwise (barring some decorative plants).
redm 5y ago
I don't think there is any conspiracy here. Lawn/Gardens have been popular for hundreds of years, at least, for the wealthy. For example, the Gardens of Versailles in France. [1] The United States has more space to person ratio than Europe too. Suburbia is just people spreading out, wanting more privacy, and being able to indulge in those garden like experiences, on a smaller scale. So I guess my point is, gardens aren't new, and many US residents have the space and the disposable income. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_Versailles
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  It's not a natural expression of preferences by any means. It's mandated by many HOAs throughout the US. I have friends who can't even put plants in their lawns because of their HOA, let alone get rid of them. It's the reason why so many West Coast governments have to place lawn watering restrictions during drought conditions, to override local HOAs.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Prior to industrialization a manicured lawn had to be mowed by scythe. They weren't common because only the wealthy could indulge in them. It has only been 100 years since mechanization was sufficiently cheap for ordinary people to be pretend Louis'.
conductr 5y ago
I actually enjoy a well kept lawn. I feel it helps the house appears tidy from the outside. It strokes my pride of home vibe. But, I pay for it all and it probably averages me $400/month all said (water, seasonal stuff, mowing, etc). It's stupid, sure. But I've never installed a lawn. I've bought houses with lawns. I couldn't justify ripping it out for some zeroscaping style landscape that is aesthetically worse (to me), has less functionality (kids+pets like grass), and comes with a price tag of $30k or more AND it still grows weeds. Most zeroscaping I've seen in my area appears to get zero attention and is completely overgrown in year 2. Also, tree care won't go away so best case I reduce my monthly spend by 50%. I don't really know what is best. I think if I were building a new home, I'd look into artificial turf. So, while interesting, what is the actionable now that we all have these horrible money pit lawns? Is there an alternative?
- Fiahil 5y ago
  > Is there an alternative? Well, I mow twice a year, don’t water except for young trees, put the leaves of my 30 trees in compost in automn, and that’s it. Just let it grow. You can use clover or any kind of cover instead of “grass”, and plant trees to keep it in the shade so it doesn’t burn. You can also grow 20-40cm high flowers as well if you like.
- nrr 5y ago
  There is, but note that I write from a particularly rural perspective here, so it might not jive well with the more suburban sensibilities I've read from your comment. Your mileage may vary. That said, you can look into growing grasses°, sedges, hostas, and wildflowers that are indigenous to your geographic region. Become good friends with the folks at your local nursery, and they'll be glad to help you out. °: not things like Kentucky bluegrass (which isn't indigenous to North America) or the various types of fescue (many of which are native to Europe); more like buffalograss and Canada wild rye
- analog31 5y ago
  >>> Is there an alternative? My family lives on a 1/3 acre lot in a neighborhood that was built around 1960. Thankfully, there is no social pressure in our locale to maintain a "perfect" lawn. Each house does its own thing, ranging from fully wooded lots, to "perfect" lawns, and everything in between. I'm using the term "perfect" for the kind of lawn described in the article, more or less. Our house is in between. What I can tell you is that there are portions of our lot that we mow. Everything else is left to chance. We don't fertilize or use weed killers. We don't water. (Fertilizer increases the need for water). The lawn is grass plus maybe a dozen other species. The grass grows in the spring, we mow a couple times, then it goes dormant as the weather gets more dry. The weeds keep it green. Through the remainder of the summer and fall, we mow maybe 3-4 times at most. I rake the leaves from the trees, use the mower to shred them, and use them for compost in the vegetable garden. The vegetable garden is growing by a few square feet per year. I bought an ancient roto-tiller off the Craig, and gradually expand the garden at the expense of the lawn. I would also be happy to let other kinds of brush grow, but it hasn't begun to happen yet. The kids were fine in our back yard. They didn't care about the weeds. The neighbors have not complained. By and large, the people in our 'hood with "perfect" lawns, are retired, and have the time to work on their lawns and gardens, plus, no kids. When I travel to the neighborhood where I grew up, in another state, it's a totally different world. Every single lawn is "perfect," with no weeds. My parents told me that a couple of their neighbors had large trees cut down because the trees were shading their grass! The difference is so stark that it's almost creepy. There's also one or two full size pickup trucks in front of every house, that almost completely obscure the lawns from the street. Bizarre.
floatingatoll 5y ago
Americans fetishize wealth and often discriminate based on signals of wealth from others, so it makes perfect sense that we fetishize a social signal of wealth that cannot be faked effectively. That's why we still have lawns, even when a third (or whatever) of our drinking water gets poured into them each year, because it's more important to signal wealth here than it is to conserve water. Unfortunately, we also have lawns because they are a sign of "cleanliness", as our racists often label their desire to exclude non-whites, and they too prioritize exclusion over conservation. In the 1950s, when perfect lawn 'suddenly' became popular (as per the article), both wealthy Americans and racist Americans (there's a lot of overlap) moving to and driving the creation of suburbs were trying to find ways to exclude both poor people and non-white people. This was implemented more and less blatantly to varying degrees, and lawns are one outcome of that exclusionary desire. Wealthy whites realized that lawns were a perfect signal of wealth, and racist whites realized that lawns were a reliable and deniable signal of "cleanliness", which is code for "whiteness". They both enforced those signals with codes and laws (and later HOAs) that require a tidily-kept lawn, in order to exclude anyone unable to afford the time and money to maintain one, and both groups benefited from each other's efforts. Those laws continue to be enforced today in many neighborhoods, against people without the resources to maintain a lawn, and against people who voluntarily choose not to. That's why police are called on someone who grows a garden in their front yard: if anyone can just not grow a lawn, then the exclusionary groups think the neighborhood will decline into poverty and crime, because it will no longer be restricted to wealthy and/or white residents only.
- sithadmin 5y ago
  Do you have any citations pointing to where "police are called on someone who grows a garden in their front yard"? Unkempt lawns are definitely a matter of civil penalties in some jurisdiction, but I've never heard of (and frankly would be shocked if there was) a municipality that actually criminalized having an unkempt lawn.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    As a kindness, I checked the first page of search results for the unquoted search phrase "arrested for unkempt lawn" for you, which provides several results about several people in several states on the first page; I stopped after the four below, and noted in passing how most of them seem to be regions where classism and/or racism remain prevalent today. https://www.fitsnews.com/2019/08/21/south-carolina-women-goes-to-jail-for-not-mowing-her-grass/ https://www.fitsnews.com/2019/08/21/south-carolina-women-goe... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-06-me-51449-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-06-me-51449... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798209/angry-woman-faced-jail-time-overgrown-yard.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798209/angry-woman... https://homeimprovementnewsjournal.com/man-arrested-for-shooting-police-code-compliance-crew-for-unkempt-lawn/ https://homeimprovementnewsjournal.com/man-arrested-for-shoo... I invite you to search on your own if you require further evidence, and if you do choose to do so, I hope the search terms above help save you time.
mountainb 5y ago
I own a fair amount of land, mostly forest, but I grew up in a city and have lived in suburbs as well, so I understand why lawns confuse people. The answer is that it's really low maintenance and it prevents erosion while also lowering the complexity of putting in adequate drainage. It's also very efficient to maintain large swaths of grass with uniform equipment, whether it's with push mowers, riding mowers, or tractors. Maintaining forest is challenging, dangerous, and more labor intensive than you might think. It's real easy to die doing forest work: trees really wanna kill you. Trees are always getting sick and grody. It's easy to accidentally kill healthy trees when you are culling dying/dead trees and, at least for me, making mistakes makes me feel sad and guilty about it. Chainsaws are easy to use and you really have to be not paying attention or not using protective equipment to hurt yourself with them -- it's the trees that are dangerous. This is one of the reasons why suburban developers don't go out of their way to plant forests even if it would make the area look nicer. There's also the question of who would maintain the forest in an area where everything is subdivided into small private plots, but any living forest requires a lot of space to grow. It is also more intellectually challenging to maintain forest. This is reflected by the difference in wage rates between forestry workers and normal landscapers. Stump removal when you have to do it is also its own set of challenges. The other reason why uniform lawns are easier to work with is something that only dawned on me after years of letting the weeds grow amidst the normal grass. Weeds grow at different rates and have different impacts on the soil. It's a lot easier to maintain a uniform lawn. A weedy lawn can look cool at some parts of the year with lots of wildflowers and then look crappy at other times when the flowers all die and it's just some weird scratchy bunch of weeds that creates a weird erosion pattern, which is a problem that is more expensive/difficult to fix than just never having it happen in the first place. I understand the intellectual perspective in this article but the explanation is very silly in light of the practical considerations that become apparent when you are responsible for land yourself. The labor-hour estimate in this article is also totally delusional, or based on some absurd standard that no one actually keeps their tiny lawn to. I mean, how would you even spent 150 hours a year maintaining a tiny suburban lawn? Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper? Huh? That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.
- cmpb 5y ago
  >it's the trees that are dangerous This reads like a lawncare shill quote
nradov 5y ago
Some people just really like lawns for their own sake. My grandfather had a huge green lawn in rural Ohio. He didn't really use it for much, but it looked nice and mowing it with his riding lawnmower was one of his favorite activities in retirement.
Androider 5y ago
"Perfect lawns" are like plain white Wonder Bread to me. I know it's the best seller, but please just give me literally anything else.
asdff 5y ago
Go ahead and try and make a vegetable garden in your front lawn. City inspector will probably cite you in many places in the US. We have the front lawn because we made everything else illegal.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  The City may not fine you, but there's a high likelihood that your HOA might, if you have one.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    You do know that's a choice you make, right?
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      A choice of one isn't much of a choice. HOA neighborhoods are also populated with people who live there because it was the only place they could get into or was least awful choice they had. Source: just escaped an HOA after 10 years. wound up there because it was the only choice we had at the time. years of misfortune kept us there.
      - rufus_foreman 5y ago
        >> it was the only choice we had at the time Just no. No it wasn't
        WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        I'm okay with you not knowing what you're talking about.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      It is not necessarily a choice people make. I mean, as with everything, people make choices that lead to risks that you can uncharitably blame them for, but people don't necessarily directly make the choice to live with an HOA. Common sense should tell you every organization has a beginning. I moved to where I am now, a couple of years ago, with the understanding there was no HOA. However, it turns out there was what I'll call a "shadow" HOA - an informal group of people that would like to be one but don't have official standing (yet). Due to some recent events, they are trying to make it official, have instituted a mailing list, have mentioned possibly having voluntary donations to support the legal costs, etc. I don't think real estate agents selling homes in the neighborhood are necessarily telling people what's going on either.
aimor 5y ago
Perhaps there should be more emphasis on sustainable lawns? That is: don't force it. Don't water it, don't use toxic pesticides, don't fertilize, and for smaller lots don't use gas powered lawn equipment. If the lawn doesn't grow in those conditions then it wasn't meant to be. I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something children mow on the weekend. I live in a richer neighborhood now, which means more lawn services, and I really do despise them for the noise. But online culture would have me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated on lawncare as a hobby. What I see is the opposite, people want a clean looking yard and find it easy to pay for it to be watered, mowed, fertilized, weeded, sprayed, edged, blown, aerated, and whatever else gets bundles together for an affordable price. Do we only think that Americans are obsessed with lawns because of how large the lawncare industry is? Or maybe the culture really is different in places where effort is required for anything close to green 12 months a year?
JohnBooty 5y ago
Lots of valid points in that article regarding the cumulative envronmental impact, but I'm baffled by some things.... I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something children mow on the weekend [...] But online culture would have me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated on lawncare as a hobby. Yeah, absolutely. I don't understand it. Movies and TV portray it that way as well -- they have you believe that all subarbanites are positively obsessed with their lawns. I've lived in middle class American suburbs nearly all my life, child and adult. Nobody obsesses over their lawns. Just never seen it. I mean, sure, if you have a lawn... you spend a certain amount of time and/or money on your lawn and while you're at it, you like to do it right. Just like literally anything else. Laundry, vacuuming, whatever. Everybody likes their home and their person to look nice if they're lucky enough to be that far up the ladder on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The lawn thing may be somewhat unique to America but wanting one's home to look nice most definitely is not. To put it in somewhat objective terms I live on a 1/4 acre lot and I spend less than 30 minutes a week mowing and edging, for approximately 7 months per year. Lawn fertilizer is about, I don't know, $30 a year. If you buy a decent lawn mower and edger that $200-$300 and they should last 10-15 years. So I guess you can amortize that out to an additional ~$20 per year. Oh, and $10 worth of gasoline for the mower. (I was gifted an ICE mower; would have chosen electric myself)
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Everyone in the country consumes the same media, but that media is not produced by everyone. Most mass media is developed by urbanites in large urban centers (LA and NYC). They have a very sheltered lifestyle that leads to anything outside of it looking alien and absurd. Folks in rural and suburban areas having lawns and needing to spend an hour a week on lawncare is already infinitely more time than folk in urban centers spend on such tasks. To the urbanite, what the rest of the country considers "lawn obsessed" is only a difference of degree, not kind. For the media producer--who, again, is almost universally an urbanite--to communicate this feeling to the rest of the country, they have to exaggerate the effort spent.
1970-01-01 5y ago
There are no-mow grasses that are not mentioned in this article. I'm interested in switching the lawn over to one of them, but reviews are mixed. Another boring season of mowing awaits.
aaron695 5y ago
Lawns are good for your mental heath. The end. If you want to be clever. Yes some people get into alternatives at a higher cost which also has community benefits which is great, like donating time at a soup kitchen, good on them. And some people get too obsessed about lawns, like people getting too obsessed about exercise. Get over it. And nothing is a cure all, lawns might not help your mental health, it's just a good start if it's possible where you live. Maybe you need lithium.
socialist_coder 5y ago
Lawns are dumb. Replace it with a garden. When the collapse happens you will be thankful you did.
- Karellen 5y ago
  > Lawns are dumb. Replace it with a garden. What?
enriquto 5y ago
Well-trimmed lawns give me the creeps, as if I was suddenly dropped in a terrifyingly dystopian Εdward Scissorhands town. What is the point of growing ugly, nondescript grasses next to your home? Freely growing vegetation with flowers and fruits is better in all cases. Forbidding your plants to flourish is akin to cutting the tails and ears of your dogs.
- spiderfarmer 5y ago
  Some people have lawns for other reasons. I like to play soccer with my kids several times per week, and have barbecue parties with bounce houses for the whole family several times per year. To me it looks nice for when it's unused and it's very practical for those activities.
curation 5y ago
One of my favorite things about St. Petersburg is that there are no lawns - specifically the parks. They are weeds and wildflowers and let to grow (I have a friend who picks some she knows for teas and gives them to me) and then, before it gets too bad mowed down a bit. In North America when I walk my tiny dog I'm always afraid to let her go on the perfect lawns for fear of what is on there. Here we both walk freely.
HPsquared 5y ago
Ironically this thread contains a lot of people discussing their local experience with lawns, then other people from thousands of miles away in different climates saying "no you're wrong, my lawn is nothing like that". The problems we have trying to maintain a monoculture!
- spiderfarmer 5y ago
  I can totally see why people have a problem with huge, unused monoculture patches of grass in dry areas, but I can't understand why people think it's a universal problem. Lawns are only a problem in areas where water is scarce. Sure, you can think of other problems with it that are "bad" for the environment, but so is literally every human activity. In my area lawns are heavily used and surrounded by flower beds, especially by families with kids, like mine.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    Drought tolerant cultivars have been in development for awhile. They’re mainly targeted at golf courses and things like that but I’d expect to see them packaged for homes in the near future. It’s really neat to see how they optimize certain grasses this way and how many years of breeding and selection it takes.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  You really have hit the nail on the head here. Plant for your climate and conditions, not what you saw in a magazine somewhere.
graderjs 5y ago
My instinctual reaction to the title was that it represents the total submission of nature. so this seemingly innocuous and joy bringing landscape motif becomes a symbol of modernity's incessant terraforming. A plain bland green field. Never bothered anyone. Considered this way it becomes somehow obscene. an abstract, banal terror. Sort of like a race of orcs using human skin mats to adorn their living rooms.
99_00 5y ago
My lawn is the second lowest maintenance feature in my yard and one of the most used. The trees are the the lowest maintenance feature. The vegetable garden is the most used. I never water my lawn and it always comes back to life when the dry season ends. My other plants have to be watered or they'll die.
scns 5y ago
Lawns were a display of high status in England, since only the wealthy had so much land that they could show off that they don't have to use all it for growing food and could afford the person taking care of it. Another trend set by british aristocracy would be the white wedding gown, first worn by a british queen. Flushed toilets where only for the super rich too in the beginning. Innovation trickling downi guess. There is a parallel how Tesla started with expensive cars to scale the technology down into the more affordable Model 3. The Mainframe -> Minicomputer -> Personal Computer -> Smartphone -> SBC development would be another example.
- DalasNoin 5y ago
  English gardens are quite famous, I think the lawn is the most plain element. They have a large amount of different flowers and plants mixed together connected by a lawn. I wonder why only the lawn part made it to america.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    It takes a lot of effort (and a bit of money) to care for an abundance of flowers and plants. Besides watering you have hedging and mulching and weeding and spreading preemergent, etc. where I live many people have professional landscapers come by weekly to mow and also take care of everything else and many people have beautiful yards. I’ve been doing it myself but I do hire a few guys in the spring and autumn to clean things up, lay new mulch (9 cubic yards!) and plant annuals of which I usually need about 120 plants. It usually takes a team of 3 guys an entire day to do everything. I take care of the rest of the maintenance in the summer but that’s a few hours per week sometimes depending on weather. Luckily this summer we’ve had ample rain so watering has mainly been cut out but weeds have thrived.
    - shapefrog 5y ago
      You also have taste and fashion. Chelsea flower show each year for example is not so different to london fashion week. Highlighting the latest trends in plant species and how to assemble them in your garden to make it look just like that of your favourite celebrity. The lawn is the black dress of garden fasion; reliable and timeless.
foxhop 5y ago
I'm building a community of people to replace lawns with food growing systems, using high moral ethics regarding inputs, process, and outputs and using permaculture principles collected scientifically though analysis and observation. The industrial lawn is a monoculture which doesn't exist in nature, as such it is inherently less efficient because it doesn't stack functions or yields. For more info: https://youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini https://youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini I'm talking small scale food systems you may set into motion on a plot of land 1/3 or less! The best thing you can do right now is to raise your mower blade deck up as high as possible and only mow one or twice per quarter. My channel nickname is "unturf", and ill give you hundreds of ways and reasons to build a natural food producing systems at your house! I look to a future of one guided by permaculture, using technology as a means to increase yield of natural systems. Let's build a solar punk future together, one where we build systems which not only sustain but regenerate!
- jefflombardjr 5y ago
  You should reach out to this permaculture community! When I was working with them there was talk about opensourcing some of the work they did to help other similar communities. https://twitter.com/PhillyYardens https://twitter.com/PhillyYardens
publicola1990 5y ago
Did Grant Woods' paintings so full of these American lawns? So it doesn't seem a recent phenomenon.
chrisgd 5y ago
Maintaining a bunch of vegetables in your front yard isn’t miraculously easier than a lawn, it may even require more work, keeping more pests away and watering. Just do what you like

108 points by notRobot 5y ago

notRobot 5y ago

TL;DR: Lawns bad.

tsjq 5y ago

HOA !

leoedin 5y ago

Faced with some lawn repair, I once joined the lawncare subreddit. It was an intense echo chamber of lawn adjacent neuroticism - stress over chemicals, mowing heights, quite a few people angry at their neighbours for foolishly trying to do them a favour by cutting some of their grass (inevitably too short or tall), and a fetishisation of the "perfect" lawn - cut short with visible stripes and no other vegetation. I definitely like lawns - they're great for running about on, playing games, having a picnic. But other vegetation is nice too. The beauty of a slightly wild garden is the abundance of nature - insects, birds, the scent of flowers. Lawns are a monoculture with none of that.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
It would be unwise to take Reddit as illustrative about how normal people feel about anything. The platform is designed to falsify the appearance of strong consensus.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  In other words, it's a collection of niche echo chambers of varying size.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Which is exactly what most people want. They want to find people with similar interests and share ideas. Don't go to the anime subreddit expecting to find anyone who's interested in a negative critique about anime.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      That problem with Reddit also applies to HN and every other "moderated with a light hand" discussion forums today. Don't go to Hacker News to speak positively about 'System Integrity Protection' or 'Sealed System Volume' on Apple computers, or to consider how the GPL might be harming open source, for example. The comments will be a tire fire of people repeating the same handful of hostile viewpoints as top-level threads (rather than upvoting that which they agree with), drowning out rational discussion and driving away anyone who doesn't agree with their viewpoint. The conversational warfare tactics are exactly the same as those used on Reddits about anime, video games, and all other topic people feel strongly enough about to create a forum for and allow participation of this nature.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Every up-vote/down-vote based system is just like this. It's all a matter of degrees after that. I miss the forums and BBSs of old.
        bigthymer 5y ago
        Were they structurally different (no voting maybe?), or just had a lot fewer people?
        Karrot_Kream 5y ago
        Structurally different. Take a look at the many Discourse groups around today. There's none of the same pile-on tendencies that Upvote based sites like HN, Reddit, and Lobste.rs has. There's nothing to gain by piling on usually, since there's no karma-with-the-crowd.
        tayo42 5y ago
        this threaded view so much better though. maybe sort by time instead of votes would be better. once you got through a few pages message boards got unreadable
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    More than just an an echo chamber, a pressure cooker designed to ratchet up over time. It rewards extreme opinions, normalizes them, then cyclically rewards even more extreme options that break the new norm.
  - notthemessiah 5y ago
    Imagine what Reddit could have been if they went with tags instead of subcommunities. Posts could have different communities interacting instead of having mutually exclusive circlejerks.
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      The downside there is spamming tags to every post.
- coolgeek 5y ago
  > The platform is designed to falsify the appearance of strong consensus The platform is designed to bring people together to discuss common interests - much like HN, and many other sites. Any false appearance of strong consensus is a cognitive error on the observer's part
goda90 5y ago
There's also a r/NoLawns subreddit worth checking out.
- dghughes 5y ago
  Just as extreme but on the other end.
  - matttproud 5y ago
    Reduction ad horseshoe theory absurdum.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
In the Portland metro area for the most part we just let our lawns go brown in the dry summer. It generally doesn't rain much from mid-June through mid-September and now the lawns look tawny like lion fur - I kind of like it, actually. My sister & BiL visted from out of state last week and they were like "why does everyone let their lawns die here?" and I actually hadn't even thought about it much before - the fish doesn't see the water, I guess. I think it's because it's going to cost a lot if you want to keep your lawn green through the summer - mostly sewer costs as they're based on water usage. That and we don't have to worry about mowing in July, August and September which is nice. And we know it won't take much for the lawns to green back up when the rains start in October.
- notJim 5y ago
  It's also not that common to have a sprinkler system here, and watering the lawn is kind of a PITA, especially if you want to avoid dirty looks for watering the sidewalk.
- mynameisash 5y ago
  +1 from Seattle. Coming from the Midwest, the brown PNW lawns annoyed me. They still do (it's a dust bowl here for months), but 90% of lawns are dormant like mine. No watering, no mowing, no big deal. When the rain comes back (very soon!), we'll green up and all will be right again.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Does Portland allow dual water meters? Here it’s semi-common to have a meter for outside water, upon which sewer rates are not charged.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    I've never seen this here.
xboxnolifes 5y ago
To be fair, that's every single subreddit that is about a relatively mundane topics. There is only so much to talk about and eventually leads to intense optimization, especially considering the population is going to be full of people who willing look to join a lawn care community. And it should be noted that the name of a subreddit does not necessarily best represent what it is. For the same reason that there are at least 6 different personal finance subreddits I am aware of.

zikduruqe 5y ago

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession-lawns/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession-lawns/ This is a really good podcast.

sjg007 5y ago

For me, its about invasive weeds, mosquitoes, ticks and other non-desireable bugs as well as rodents. But I live near a field! So the lawn serves as a buffer and lawns are very good at suppressing weeds. I could go with clover though which we are cultivating on the small hill next to us to buffer us from the field instead of grass though. A lot of my neighbors have had their lawns overridden by crab grass anyway so is that still a lawn at that point? Having a lawn also is nice for the kids.

goda90 5y ago
In my opinion, a lawn should be a space where vegetation covers all of the ground, and is kept under a few inches tall. As long as that's not thistles or poison ivy, then you can play on that all you want. My lawn has all sorts of grasses, clover, dandelions and wood violets in it. I get to see frogs and fireflies in the evening because I don't spray chemicals to kill them off. Mosquitos are inevitable. If you spray for them, you're also killing their predators like spiders and dragonflies, but not their food supply(you) so they bounce back really fast, way before their predators can recover.
- finiteseries 5y ago
  They live next to a field and mentioned using the lawn as a buffer, twice, in what is assumedly a sort of rural area. Not as the red carpet for a wildlife oasis in paved over suburbia which this sort of advice is inevitably geared towards. You don’t need to spray for mosquitoes and ticks and ruin the local ecosystem when they’re happy in their field at a healthy distance with a nice, clean lawn in between you.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  At least here in the DC area, the natural predators are not up to the task of controlling the mosquitos. We don't spray and we don't have any nearby bodies of standing water and our yards are still unbearable with tiny tiger mosquitos every summer. Luckily, it's also just plain too hot and humid to bother with outside in the summer, so yeah, fuck summer.
jefflombardjr 5y ago

OldHand2018 5y ago

> Using a gas-powered leaf blower for half an hour creates as many polluting hydrocarbon emissions as driving a car seventy-seven hundred miles at a speed of thirty miles per hour. Battery-powered leaf blowers are so incredibly good that I have a hard time understanding why anyone buys a new gas-powered leaf blower.

wavefunction 5y ago
I don't mind plugging mine in (it's corded). I even use it to clean the gutters every fall. Even better than batteries unless you really need that mobility.
zdragnar 5y ago
I have both. My 80v leaf blower is pretty decent for about 15 minutes, and with two batteries there isnt a ton of downtime. However, we also have three massive cottonwood trees among plenty of other maple and crap that amounts to feet of fallen leaves to clean up. On a whim I got a backpack style gas leaf blower, and now we only use the battery one for "maintenance" blowing. There simply isn't a good analogy to describe the difference. That said, at my previous house in the suburbs, the battery powered one was plenty sufficient, so YMMV.
dmurray 5y ago
That aside, "polluting hydrocarbon emissions" is doing a lot of work there. It creates perhaps a thousandth as much CO2, which is the most worrying exhaust pollutant these days.
- ProfessorLayton 5y ago
  I'd argue the opposite. Gas-powered leaf blowers are insanely pollutant. Running a gas leaf blower for an hour is equivalent to driving a car for 100 miles [1] [1] https://sustainability.wustl.edu/rethinking-lawn-equipment-2/ https://sustainability.wustl.edu/rethinking-lawn-equipment-2...
  - dmurray 5y ago

zdragnar 5y ago

They offer a clear line of sight, look "clean", and keep rodents and other pests at bay. Personally, only about a quarter of my property is grass, and I am amazed at the acres of grass I see in the country, but I don't think I would want less than half an acre's worth around the house otherwise (barring some decorative plants).

redm 5y ago

I don't think there is any conspiracy here. Lawn/Gardens have been popular for hundreds of years, at least, for the wealthy. For example, the Gardens of Versailles in France. [1] The United States has more space to person ratio than Europe too. Suburbia is just people spreading out, wanting more privacy, and being able to indulge in those garden like experiences, on a smaller scale. So I guess my point is, gardens aren't new, and many US residents have the space and the disposable income. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardens_of_Versailles

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
It's not a natural expression of preferences by any means. It's mandated by many HOAs throughout the US. I have friends who can't even put plants in their lawns because of their HOA, let alone get rid of them. It's the reason why so many West Coast governments have to place lawn watering restrictions during drought conditions, to override local HOAs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Prior to industrialization a manicured lawn had to be mowed by scythe. They weren't common because only the wealthy could indulge in them. It has only been 100 years since mechanization was sufficiently cheap for ordinary people to be pretend Louis'.

conductr 5y ago

I actually enjoy a well kept lawn. I feel it helps the house appears tidy from the outside. It strokes my pride of home vibe. But, I pay for it all and it probably averages me $400/month all said (water, seasonal stuff, mowing, etc). It's stupid, sure. But I've never installed a lawn. I've bought houses with lawns. I couldn't justify ripping it out for some zeroscaping style landscape that is aesthetically worse (to me), has less functionality (kids+pets like grass), and comes with a price tag of $30k or more AND it still grows weeds. Most zeroscaping I've seen in my area appears to get zero attention and is completely overgrown in year 2. Also, tree care won't go away so best case I reduce my monthly spend by 50%. I don't really know what is best. I think if I were building a new home, I'd look into artificial turf. So, while interesting, what is the actionable now that we all have these horrible money pit lawns? Is there an alternative?

Fiahil 5y ago
> Is there an alternative? Well, I mow twice a year, don’t water except for young trees, put the leaves of my 30 trees in compost in automn, and that’s it. Just let it grow. You can use clover or any kind of cover instead of “grass”, and plant trees to keep it in the shade so it doesn’t burn. You can also grow 20-40cm high flowers as well if you like.
nrr 5y ago
There is, but note that I write from a particularly rural perspective here, so it might not jive well with the more suburban sensibilities I've read from your comment. Your mileage may vary. That said, you can look into growing grasses°, sedges, hostas, and wildflowers that are indigenous to your geographic region. Become good friends with the folks at your local nursery, and they'll be glad to help you out. °: not things like Kentucky bluegrass (which isn't indigenous to North America) or the various types of fescue (many of which are native to Europe); more like buffalograss and Canada wild rye
analog31 5y ago
>>> Is there an alternative? My family lives on a 1/3 acre lot in a neighborhood that was built around 1960. Thankfully, there is no social pressure in our locale to maintain a "perfect" lawn. Each house does its own thing, ranging from fully wooded lots, to "perfect" lawns, and everything in between. I'm using the term "perfect" for the kind of lawn described in the article, more or less. Our house is in between. What I can tell you is that there are portions of our lot that we mow. Everything else is left to chance. We don't fertilize or use weed killers. We don't water. (Fertilizer increases the need for water). The lawn is grass plus maybe a dozen other species. The grass grows in the spring, we mow a couple times, then it goes dormant as the weather gets more dry. The weeds keep it green. Through the remainder of the summer and fall, we mow maybe 3-4 times at most. I rake the leaves from the trees, use the mower to shred them, and use them for compost in the vegetable garden. The vegetable garden is growing by a few square feet per year. I bought an ancient roto-tiller off the Craig, and gradually expand the garden at the expense of the lawn. I would also be happy to let other kinds of brush grow, but it hasn't begun to happen yet. The kids were fine in our back yard. They didn't care about the weeds. The neighbors have not complained. By and large, the people in our 'hood with "perfect" lawns, are retired, and have the time to work on their lawns and gardens, plus, no kids. When I travel to the neighborhood where I grew up, in another state, it's a totally different world. Every single lawn is "perfect," with no weeds. My parents told me that a couple of their neighbors had large trees cut down because the trees were shading their grass! The difference is so stark that it's almost creepy. There's also one or two full size pickup trucks in front of every house, that almost completely obscure the lawns from the street. Bizarre.

floatingatoll 5y ago

Americans fetishize wealth and often discriminate based on signals of wealth from others, so it makes perfect sense that we fetishize a social signal of wealth that cannot be faked effectively. That's why we still have lawns, even when a third (or whatever) of our drinking water gets poured into them each year, because it's more important to signal wealth here than it is to conserve water. Unfortunately, we also have lawns because they are a sign of "cleanliness", as our racists often label their desire to exclude non-whites, and they too prioritize exclusion over conservation. In the 1950s, when perfect lawn 'suddenly' became popular (as per the article), both wealthy Americans and racist Americans (there's a lot of overlap) moving to and driving the creation of suburbs were trying to find ways to exclude both poor people and non-white people. This was implemented more and less blatantly to varying degrees, and lawns are one outcome of that exclusionary desire. Wealthy whites realized that lawns were a perfect signal of wealth, and racist whites realized that lawns were a reliable and deniable signal of "cleanliness", which is code for "whiteness". They both enforced those signals with codes and laws (and later HOAs) that require a tidily-kept lawn, in order to exclude anyone unable to afford the time and money to maintain one, and both groups benefited from each other's efforts. Those laws continue to be enforced today in many neighborhoods, against people without the resources to maintain a lawn, and against people who voluntarily choose not to. That's why police are called on someone who grows a garden in their front yard: if anyone can just not grow a lawn, then the exclusionary groups think the neighborhood will decline into poverty and crime, because it will no longer be restricted to wealthy and/or white residents only.

sithadmin 5y ago
Do you have any citations pointing to where "police are called on someone who grows a garden in their front yard"? Unkempt lawns are definitely a matter of civil penalties in some jurisdiction, but I've never heard of (and frankly would be shocked if there was) a municipality that actually criminalized having an unkempt lawn.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  As a kindness, I checked the first page of search results for the unquoted search phrase "arrested for unkempt lawn" for you, which provides several results about several people in several states on the first page; I stopped after the four below, and noted in passing how most of them seem to be regions where classism and/or racism remain prevalent today. https://www.fitsnews.com/2019/08/21/south-carolina-women-goes-to-jail-for-not-mowing-her-grass/ https://www.fitsnews.com/2019/08/21/south-carolina-women-goe... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-06-me-51449-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-06-me-51449... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798209/angry-woman-faced-jail-time-overgrown-yard.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798209/angry-woman... https://homeimprovementnewsjournal.com/man-arrested-for-shooting-police-code-compliance-crew-for-unkempt-lawn/ https://homeimprovementnewsjournal.com/man-arrested-for-shoo... I invite you to search on your own if you require further evidence, and if you do choose to do so, I hope the search terms above help save you time.

mountainb 5y ago

I own a fair amount of land, mostly forest, but I grew up in a city and have lived in suburbs as well, so I understand why lawns confuse people. The answer is that it's really low maintenance and it prevents erosion while also lowering the complexity of putting in adequate drainage. It's also very efficient to maintain large swaths of grass with uniform equipment, whether it's with push mowers, riding mowers, or tractors. Maintaining forest is challenging, dangerous, and more labor intensive than you might think. It's real easy to die doing forest work: trees really wanna kill you. Trees are always getting sick and grody. It's easy to accidentally kill healthy trees when you are culling dying/dead trees and, at least for me, making mistakes makes me feel sad and guilty about it. Chainsaws are easy to use and you really have to be not paying attention or not using protective equipment to hurt yourself with them -- it's the trees that are dangerous. This is one of the reasons why suburban developers don't go out of their way to plant forests even if it would make the area look nicer. There's also the question of who would maintain the forest in an area where everything is subdivided into small private plots, but any living forest requires a lot of space to grow. It is also more intellectually challenging to maintain forest. This is reflected by the difference in wage rates between forestry workers and normal landscapers. Stump removal when you have to do it is also its own set of challenges. The other reason why uniform lawns are easier to work with is something that only dawned on me after years of letting the weeds grow amidst the normal grass. Weeds grow at different rates and have different impacts on the soil. It's a lot easier to maintain a uniform lawn. A weedy lawn can look cool at some parts of the year with lots of wildflowers and then look crappy at other times when the flowers all die and it's just some weird scratchy bunch of weeds that creates a weird erosion pattern, which is a problem that is more expensive/difficult to fix than just never having it happen in the first place. I understand the intellectual perspective in this article but the explanation is very silly in light of the practical considerations that become apparent when you are responsible for land yourself. The labor-hour estimate in this article is also totally delusional, or based on some absurd standard that no one actually keeps their tiny lawn to. I mean, how would you even spent 150 hours a year maintaining a tiny suburban lawn? Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper? Huh? That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.

cmpb 5y ago
>it's the trees that are dangerous This reads like a lawncare shill quote

nradov 5y ago

Some people just really like lawns for their own sake. My grandfather had a huge green lawn in rural Ohio. He didn't really use it for much, but it looked nice and mowing it with his riding lawnmower was one of his favorite activities in retirement.

Androider 5y ago

"Perfect lawns" are like plain white Wonder Bread to me. I know it's the best seller, but please just give me literally anything else.

asdff 5y ago

Go ahead and try and make a vegetable garden in your front lawn. City inspector will probably cite you in many places in the US. We have the front lawn because we made everything else illegal.

enraged_camel 5y ago
The City may not fine you, but there's a high likelihood that your HOA might, if you have one.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  You do know that's a choice you make, right?
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    A choice of one isn't much of a choice. HOA neighborhoods are also populated with people who live there because it was the only place they could get into or was least awful choice they had. Source: just escaped an HOA after 10 years. wound up there because it was the only choice we had at the time. years of misfortune kept us there.
    - rufus_foreman 5y ago
      >> it was the only choice we had at the time Just no. No it wasn't
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        I'm okay with you not knowing what you're talking about.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    It is not necessarily a choice people make. I mean, as with everything, people make choices that lead to risks that you can uncharitably blame them for, but people don't necessarily directly make the choice to live with an HOA. Common sense should tell you every organization has a beginning. I moved to where I am now, a couple of years ago, with the understanding there was no HOA. However, it turns out there was what I'll call a "shadow" HOA - an informal group of people that would like to be one but don't have official standing (yet). Due to some recent events, they are trying to make it official, have instituted a mailing list, have mentioned possibly having voluntary donations to support the legal costs, etc. I don't think real estate agents selling homes in the neighborhood are necessarily telling people what's going on either.

aimor 5y ago

Perhaps there should be more emphasis on sustainable lawns? That is: don't force it. Don't water it, don't use toxic pesticides, don't fertilize, and for smaller lots don't use gas powered lawn equipment. If the lawn doesn't grow in those conditions then it wasn't meant to be. I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something children mow on the weekend. I live in a richer neighborhood now, which means more lawn services, and I really do despise them for the noise. But online culture would have me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated on lawncare as a hobby. What I see is the opposite, people want a clean looking yard and find it easy to pay for it to be watered, mowed, fertilized, weeded, sprayed, edged, blown, aerated, and whatever else gets bundles together for an affordable price. Do we only think that Americans are obsessed with lawns because of how large the lawncare industry is? Or maybe the culture really is different in places where effort is required for anything close to green 12 months a year?

JohnBooty 5y ago

Lots of valid points in that article regarding the cumulative envronmental impact, but I'm baffled by some things.... I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something children mow on the weekend [...] But online culture would have me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated on lawncare as a hobby. Yeah, absolutely. I don't understand it. Movies and TV portray it that way as well -- they have you believe that all subarbanites are positively obsessed with their lawns. I've lived in middle class American suburbs nearly all my life, child and adult. Nobody obsesses over their lawns. Just never seen it. I mean, sure, if you have a lawn... you spend a certain amount of time and/or money on your lawn and while you're at it, you like to do it right. Just like literally anything else. Laundry, vacuuming, whatever. Everybody likes their home and their person to look nice if they're lucky enough to be that far up the ladder on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The lawn thing may be somewhat unique to America but wanting one's home to look nice most definitely is not. To put it in somewhat objective terms I live on a 1/4 acre lot and I spend less than 30 minutes a week mowing and edging, for approximately 7 months per year. Lawn fertilizer is about, I don't know, $30 a year. If you buy a decent lawn mower and edger that $200-$300 and they should last 10-15 years. So I guess you can amortize that out to an additional ~$20 per year. Oh, and $10 worth of gasoline for the mower. (I was gifted an ICE mower; would have chosen electric myself)

moron4hire 5y ago
Everyone in the country consumes the same media, but that media is not produced by everyone. Most mass media is developed by urbanites in large urban centers (LA and NYC). They have a very sheltered lifestyle that leads to anything outside of it looking alien and absurd. Folks in rural and suburban areas having lawns and needing to spend an hour a week on lawncare is already infinitely more time than folk in urban centers spend on such tasks. To the urbanite, what the rest of the country considers "lawn obsessed" is only a difference of degree, not kind. For the media producer--who, again, is almost universally an urbanite--to communicate this feeling to the rest of the country, they have to exaggerate the effort spent.

1970-01-01 5y ago

There are no-mow grasses that are not mentioned in this article. I'm interested in switching the lawn over to one of them, but reviews are mixed. Another boring season of mowing awaits.

aaron695 5y ago

Lawns are good for your mental heath. The end. If you want to be clever. Yes some people get into alternatives at a higher cost which also has community benefits which is great, like donating time at a soup kitchen, good on them. And some people get too obsessed about lawns, like people getting too obsessed about exercise. Get over it. And nothing is a cure all, lawns might not help your mental health, it's just a good start if it's possible where you live. Maybe you need lithium.

socialist_coder 5y ago

Lawns are dumb. Replace it with a garden. When the collapse happens you will be thankful you did.

Karellen 5y ago
> Lawns are dumb. Replace it with a garden. What?

enriquto 5y ago

Well-trimmed lawns give me the creeps, as if I was suddenly dropped in a terrifyingly dystopian Εdward Scissorhands town. What is the point of growing ugly, nondescript grasses next to your home? Freely growing vegetation with flowers and fruits is better in all cases. Forbidding your plants to flourish is akin to cutting the tails and ears of your dogs.

spiderfarmer 5y ago
Some people have lawns for other reasons. I like to play soccer with my kids several times per week, and have barbecue parties with bounce houses for the whole family several times per year. To me it looks nice for when it's unused and it's very practical for those activities.

curation 5y ago

One of my favorite things about St. Petersburg is that there are no lawns - specifically the parks. They are weeds and wildflowers and let to grow (I have a friend who picks some she knows for teas and gives them to me) and then, before it gets too bad mowed down a bit. In North America when I walk my tiny dog I'm always afraid to let her go on the perfect lawns for fear of what is on there. Here we both walk freely.

HPsquared 5y ago

Ironically this thread contains a lot of people discussing their local experience with lawns, then other people from thousands of miles away in different climates saying "no you're wrong, my lawn is nothing like that". The problems we have trying to maintain a monoculture!

spiderfarmer 5y ago
I can totally see why people have a problem with huge, unused monoculture patches of grass in dry areas, but I can't understand why people think it's a universal problem. Lawns are only a problem in areas where water is scarce. Sure, you can think of other problems with it that are "bad" for the environment, but so is literally every human activity. In my area lawns are heavily used and surrounded by flower beds, especially by families with kids, like mine.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  Drought tolerant cultivars have been in development for awhile. They’re mainly targeted at golf courses and things like that but I’d expect to see them packaged for homes in the near future. It’s really neat to see how they optimize certain grasses this way and how many years of breeding and selection it takes.
shapefrog 5y ago
You really have hit the nail on the head here. Plant for your climate and conditions, not what you saw in a magazine somewhere.

graderjs 5y ago

My instinctual reaction to the title was that it represents the total submission of nature. so this seemingly innocuous and joy bringing landscape motif becomes a symbol of modernity's incessant terraforming. A plain bland green field. Never bothered anyone. Considered this way it becomes somehow obscene. an abstract, banal terror. Sort of like a race of orcs using human skin mats to adorn their living rooms.

99_00 5y ago

My lawn is the second lowest maintenance feature in my yard and one of the most used. The trees are the the lowest maintenance feature. The vegetable garden is the most used. I never water my lawn and it always comes back to life when the dry season ends. My other plants have to be watered or they'll die.

scns 5y ago

Lawns were a display of high status in England, since only the wealthy had so much land that they could show off that they don't have to use all it for growing food and could afford the person taking care of it. Another trend set by british aristocracy would be the white wedding gown, first worn by a british queen. Flushed toilets where only for the super rich too in the beginning. Innovation trickling downi guess. There is a parallel how Tesla started with expensive cars to scale the technology down into the more affordable Model 3. The Mainframe -> Minicomputer -> Personal Computer -> Smartphone -> SBC development would be another example.

DalasNoin 5y ago
English gardens are quite famous, I think the lawn is the most plain element. They have a large amount of different flowers and plants mixed together connected by a lawn. I wonder why only the lawn part made it to america.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  It takes a lot of effort (and a bit of money) to care for an abundance of flowers and plants. Besides watering you have hedging and mulching and weeding and spreading preemergent, etc. where I live many people have professional landscapers come by weekly to mow and also take care of everything else and many people have beautiful yards. I’ve been doing it myself but I do hire a few guys in the spring and autumn to clean things up, lay new mulch (9 cubic yards!) and plant annuals of which I usually need about 120 plants. It usually takes a team of 3 guys an entire day to do everything. I take care of the rest of the maintenance in the summer but that’s a few hours per week sometimes depending on weather. Luckily this summer we’ve had ample rain so watering has mainly been cut out but weeds have thrived.
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    You also have taste and fashion. Chelsea flower show each year for example is not so different to london fashion week. Highlighting the latest trends in plant species and how to assemble them in your garden to make it look just like that of your favourite celebrity. The lawn is the black dress of garden fasion; reliable and timeless.

foxhop 5y ago

I'm building a community of people to replace lawns with food growing systems, using high moral ethics regarding inputs, process, and outputs and using permaculture principles collected scientifically though analysis and observation. The industrial lawn is a monoculture which doesn't exist in nature, as such it is inherently less efficient because it doesn't stack functions or yields. For more info: https://youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini https://youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini I'm talking small scale food systems you may set into motion on a plot of land 1/3 or less! The best thing you can do right now is to raise your mower blade deck up as high as possible and only mow one or twice per quarter. My channel nickname is "unturf", and ill give you hundreds of ways and reasons to build a natural food producing systems at your house! I look to a future of one guided by permaculture, using technology as a means to increase yield of natural systems. Let's build a solar punk future together, one where we build systems which not only sustain but regenerate!

jefflombardjr 5y ago
You should reach out to this permaculture community! When I was working with them there was talk about opensourcing some of the work they did to help other similar communities. https://twitter.com/PhillyYardens https://twitter.com/PhillyYardens

publicola1990 5y ago

Did Grant Woods' paintings so full of these American lawns? So it doesn't seem a recent phenomenon.

chrisgd 5y ago

Maintaining a bunch of vegetables in your front yard isn’t miraculously easier than a lawn, it may even require more work, keeping more pests away and watering. Just do what you like