A Green Velvety Carpet: The Front Lawn in America

Domestic front lawns in the United States didn't just happen. Lawns do not grow naturally. They are a learned aesthetic that has become popular during the past 120 years. European colonists did not find lawn or pasture grasses in America. They brought them with them. Since then, particularly during the 20th century, there has been a radical change in the ecological makeup of America with millions of acres of lawn grass creating a savannah from coast to coast.Front lawns are an American cultural artifact. Americans have been taught to desire and to care for lawns. Lawns are achieved at great expense and by continual labor. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides have been developed to help homeowners achieve an ideal lawn. Millions of dollars are invested in lawn mowing machinery and irrigation equipment every year. Scarce water resources are allocated to domestic and municipal lawns in the Southwest. A multimillion-dollar lawn care industry has developed in the United States, unlike any other country in the world. To most Americans, grassy yards are so familiar, so common and so ubiquitous that it is difficult to imagine an alternative landscape without them and to realize that most people in other countries do not have American-style front lawns.In the 18th century, Washington and Jefferson and a few other wealthy Americans emulated the landscape of English country estates. Nineteenth-century-American landscape architects such as Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted also modeled their work after English country house parks.Nineteenth-century suburban houses were furnished with front lawns in emulation of upper-class park-like estates and the new municipal parks such as Central Park in New York, Front lawns were semipublic spaces that belonged to the community. Suburban developments were designed with houses set back from the street "in a park." Many 19th-century suburbs were named Park such as Tuxedo Park in New York, and College Park, Takoma Park, Garrett Park and Cleveland Park outside of Washington, D.C.The invention and manufacture of the lawn mower and irrigation equipment growing availability of a public water supply and the importation of hybridization of appropriate grasses brought the cost of making and keeping a lawn within the reach of a growing middle class of homeowners. Products for the new lawns were promoted through advertising, mail-order catalogs, gardening books and magazine and newspaper articles on lawn keeping that educated many Americans in the w landscape aesthetic. The lawn aesthetic was also promoted through the work of the ladies of the Garden Club of America and other similar organizations, City Beautiful campaigns and the combined efforts of the United States Golf Association and the United States Department of Agriculture.In the 1920s suburban developments were built around or modeled after golf courses. By World War II the pattern for suburban developments had become fixed. Developers surrounded tract houses with grass as the easiest and cheapest way to cover the scars of construction. The family that moved in was left to cope with the care of the new lawn. Peer pressure kept homeowners at work on their lawns through neighborly rivalry and community regulation. These standards were reinforced by advertising and horticultural advice in popular magazines.The lawn care industry used popular magazines to sell the idea of a "good" lawn to middle-class Americans. As new products became available for lawn care, the standards for a good lawn tended to rise. Advertisers promoted these standards in order to sell more lawn care products. Lawns were marketed to homeowners in terms of status and prestige. They were promoted as a good investment that would, perhaps, increase the real estate value of the home. Magazine readers were told that a good lawn represented good citizenship in transient communities in which residents were judged on the appearance of the home from the street. …