Death of the Lawn?

It happens every year. In fact, by the testimony of the unused bags of “Fall Weed and Feed” in my garage, it happens twice a year: I contemplate the state of my lawn, watch the spread of clover and dandelions and weigh whether or not I should put down the recommended chemicals that will magically choke the weeds and fertilize the grasses—correction, grass, singular: as per the suburban lawn usual, my lawn is predominantly made up of Kentucky bluegrass, which may or may not be a native of Kentucky.

But the issue of lawns has swollen in my mind to being almost unmanageable. On the one hand there is the tradition of lawns and what they signify. I have a sense that in my parents’ generation, lawns meant a great deal. I get this from a number of sources. When we used to drive around the countryside, my father saved his encomium for the most well-manicured farm places: carefully tended flower beds, newly painted buildings, and newly-mowed straight-lined lawns. “This guy’s a good operator,” he’d say. “Always has his place just like a park!” We, too, mowed our lawn carefully, often in diagonal lines, which my parents found the most attractive.

I see this same tradition in our next door neighbors to the south, high school contemporaries of my parents, who mow their lawn at a ratio of two or three times to our once. They have a bird bath, a stone eagle, and an American flag as part of their carefully constructed landscaping, and I once had to trim one of my trees because it “messed with” his flag. It was true enough, just totally not in my line of thinking on these sorts of things.

What makes me think about lawn care again is that these neighbors, on one of their mowing expeditions have mowed well into our lawn—at least two full swipes, a total of eight or so feet. I’m wondering if this is a message. Is it a hint? “Mow your lawn regularly or I will?” Is it pity? “Those poor Schaaps are so overwhelmed—we’ll help them out a little bit!” Or is it simply pragmatics: they have a rider, we don’t; therefore it’s easier for them to mow our lawn.

Then, too, there’s the issue of the denigration of our bluegrass monoculture. Clover is spreading like a plague; the first spring dandelions arched up their straw necks and poofy heads in alarming numbers; a colony of succors formed a small forest around one of our trees. I even found unidentified white flowers blooming where an old flower bed used to be.

What might the neighbors be saying?

I’m made all the more paranoid because a neighbor across the road approached me in the coffee shop the other day.

“You’re not going to turn me in for breaking the Sabbath, are you?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Sunday afternoon I said to my wife, ‘Is it worse thinking about it or actually doing it?’” A fair point, I thought. It turns out he was talking about our other neighbors across the road who care not at all about dandelions and so have a regular field full of them. “I knew they were gone to the lake so I filled my lawn tractor up with a tank of spray and started spraying.” He grins sheepishly. “I sprayed three whole tanks full before I was done.”

It’s funny but also a type of insult. I take notice.

I’m tempted to say this lawn critique is dated, but that’s not quite true. Not long ago, friends of ours were talking about lawn practices. They were commenting on one gentleman whose habit of mowing his lawn at night, with a flashlight, resulted both in crooked lines in his lawn and whisperings from his neighbors. “Of course,” the story ended, “he had more problems.”

Clearly, the two are not unconnected: a lawn poorly cared for signifies a soul in disarray. That’s what I’m afraid of.

The American lawn is not, of course, without its critics. For example, in Steve Martin’s “The W.A.S.P.”, a satire of the ’50s family, the father initiates his son into the adult world of ownership by classifying his own lawn as a luxury item:

A luxury item is a thing that you have that annoys other people that you have it. Like our very green lawn. That’s a luxury item. Oh, it could be less green, I suppose; but that’s not what it’s about. I work on that lawn, maybe more than I should and pour a little bit o’ money into it, but it’s a luxury item for me, out there to annoy the others. (19)

The Minnesota writer and prairie champion Paul Gruchow let his lawn grow and got turned in by his neighbors. The county agent came by to tell Gruchow he had to mow his lawn on the authority that otherwise he would be spreading noxious weeds to his neighbors. Gruchow asked him about the different plants which had grown up in his lawn, some of which were native prairie plants. The agent didn’t know what they were and just stuck by his demand that Gruchow mow his lawn, leaving Gruchow to bemoan the fact that if county agents don’t know what’s what in the plant world, who does?

Then there’s the environmental effects. Among other things, run off from lawns is notoriously implicated in the insane algae blooms in Minnesota lakes that turns the waters aqua and makes them unswimmable.

I also simply don’t trust the smell. It smells like cancer. I’ve seen the signs posted on my neighbor’s professionally treated lawns—from companies like “TruGreen” and “ChemLawn”; thank you, a lawn that is chemically green is not truly green, and I want a grass lawn, not a chemical lawn—that warn small children to stay away. What’s the difference in my bag fertilizer, even though the bag proclaims “zero phosphorous,” but warns me to wear gloves and long pants and to burn them as soon as I’m through with them (okay, it says “wash them”), and to keep the “drift” away from people and “desirable” plants, and make sure it doesn’t wash off into storm sewers? Coupling these warnings with the nature of drop-spreaders—surely the most imprecise technology since all the technology invented to plug runaway oil wells on the ocean floor—and it seems a recipe for disaster.

“Don’t go on the lawn for a while,” I’ll tell my children, “I just put poison on it.”

My solution to everything is to sow my lawn down in a mixture of prairie grasses and let it grow. I’ve approached another neighbor who’s a biology teacher and he’s in agreement. So’s the neighbor two doors down who mowed his lawn three times total all last summer, though he raised the potential difficulty we might have in finding the kids. We’d quite literally have to beat the—well, grasses to find them.

But imagine not only the flora but the fauna on such a lawn. In the morning I could step out on my patio and shoot a pheasant rising from the blue stem without leaving my own property. Okay, so that’s its own distortion.

In any case, I don’t think it would fly with the town council. Runaway grasses would no doubt decrease “curb appeal” and unbeautify our tidy little town.

Still, the trend may be in my favor, though it may take a while to reach Edgerton. Buffalo grass has begun replacing Kentucky blue grass in some western locales. Even the Minnesota Twins move from the Metrodome to Target Field seems to be in my favor. Early in Target Field’s young life, a kestrel perched atop one of the foul poles and caught and ate all the moths it could. Last week, a squirrel came out on the field, prompting chants of “Let’s go, squirrel” from the crowd. The TV announcer remarked fantastically and sarcastically, “Eventually we’ll have deer out here. Moose. Bear.”

And I say amen.

Martin, Steve. WASP and Other Plays. Samuel French, 1998. Web. Google Books. 2 June 2010.