The Grass Cult
ANNETTE TELLS TALES Why people think what they think about an utterly useless and dull rectangle of grass
Note from Annette
As May ends, the buzz of lawnmowers outside is the soundtrack on a Midwestern US weekend. Even the most avid environmentalists, having held off through most of May to help out the little bugs that live in the leaves and tall grass, are sighing and firing up their mowers. Why? There’s a law that requires keeping grass trimmed, in oh-so-liberal Madison, Wisconsin, which has been in active denial for years that “No Mow May” is a thing. To do otherwise is to go against a culture decades in the making, a culture still powerful, that results in well-meaning neighbors offering to mow the Laing/Benoti lawn, an offer that we politely turn down, while acknowledging that it’s much nicer than accusing us of laziness to our faces.
This is why I picked up a decades-old scholarly history book, the only one on the subject of lawns that I know exists, and decided to riff on it for you.
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The History of American Lawns? Seriously?
Yes, indeedy. That’s not just a patch of grass in front of your house. It's your time, your money, your stress level, your health, and so much more. And it has a history that may blow your mind. It did mine. It's the Great American Front Lawn.
Virginia Scott Jenkins’s The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, is the best (and—shocked, I am— only) book on the history of American lawns. It is so, so much more interesting than that sounds, or it wouldn’t belong in Non-Boring History, would it, now? Look, just trust me on this one. Even though “lawn” rhymes with “yawn”.
A Brit Encounters the Great American Lawn
As a teen in California, this Brit sometimes took long walks on ludicrously narrow and underused gleaming sidewalks, bordered by lawns. I had never seen anything like these lawns: Thick, dark green, and luxurious, every blade identical. To me, lawns represented why California was superior to tatty old England (teen eyeroll): Glossy, glamorous, big, and beautiful.
In Britain, okay, yes, there were and are neat lawns with incredible stripes mowed into them. Mostly, though, we see them at Downton Abbey-like country estates that open to the public, or the tennis courts at Wimbledon. Lawns are almost always tucked behind hedges and fences, and are not intended for public display.
True, my family had a front lawn in England that was open to the street, but then we rented our house from local government, and it was newly-built, and may have reflected American influence. The clover/grass was mowed for us with zero care by young council employees doing loop the loop in enormous rider-mowers. Not that anyone cared. My Dad, never a keen gardener, only noticed the front lawn when some numpty at the council decided that our street needed a public trash bin, and installed it in our front lawn. After my Dad called, it was hurriedly removed.
Walking in Sacramento in summer, then, was a very different Lawn Experience. The best thing? When the magic sprinklers came on. Rising from the ground as one, these little black pillars cast water upon the grass, and, with luck, me. If I was really lucky, a sprinkler malfunctioned, and sent lovely cooling mists or even great jets of water onto the sidewalk, and, again, me. Sacramento in summer is a furnace. I could get soaked, and be dry and cool within a minute.
I did wonder, though, what was the point of these carefully maintained lawns that nobody ever used?
Moving to Southern California, years later, I lived in rental apartments and condos, with unnaturally green lawns in front of my buildings. I was used to them by now, and nobody expected me to care for them.
But I was starting—just starting— to realize that all these barely-used or even unused lawns were strange. We were in a desert. The authorities were always urging us to save water, even to stop the tap while we brushed our teeth. Scarce water, it seemed, was needed for farming, which I, understandably, assumed meant the vegetables we ate. And when the droughts got bad in greater Los Angeles, we were told to water our lawns less.
It never occurred to me to ask why, in California, we had lawns at all.
A Brit Confronts American Lawn Obsession
I’d stopped thinking about lawns a long time ago when Hoosen and I bought a house on nearly an acre of grass in a small town in south Georgia. Fortunately, nobody in our neighborhood much cared what we did with our lawn, so long as it got mowed occasionally.
Our grass went brown and crispy in the autumn, but so did everyone else’s. Lawns are not sacred in small-town Georgia, which has a brutal climate. It wasn’t unusual for people to park cars on front lawns for parties. Of course, you didn’t sit on the lawn, even in the back garden, unless you relished the idea of fire ants biting you on the bum.
By the time we moved to Wisconsin, lawns were the last thing on my mind. We arrived in summer, and bought in a neighborhood with lush, perfect lawns, up and down the street. We saw men, and the occasional woman, mowing. Often. More worryingly, they also sometimes wore plastic vats full of chemicals strapped to their backs, and used little wands to shoot pesticide at every dandelion.
Uh oh. We felt the peer pressure. But we flat out don’t do chemicals, we’re not the best gardeners, and we don’t fundamentally care about lawns. We figured we would just mow on the usual as-needed basis.
Meanwhile, I was getting interested, partly under the influence of my brilliant gardening neighbor, in why lawns are a problem. Why we need more native plants, especially flowering plants, to support the bee population, which, for the first time in Earth’s history, is under serious threat. I learned from her about No-Mow May, when everybody is encouraged to refrain from mowing their lawns for a month in spring to give the insects a chance.
And then I read about the fines for lawn neglect. That’s right, the city will fine you if you don’t mow, and if a neighbor complains about your lawn. This, to emphasize, is in oh-so-liberal Madison, Wisconsin. Not Madison, Georgia.
I wrote to my local council representative. She sent me a copy of the council’s “Hug a Bee” proclamation (not really, but you get the idea), suggesting that nature is rather sweet and nice to notice occasionally.
Yes, whatever, I replied, I don’t even like bees. All I want is to live in an environment that sustains human life. What about ending this nonsense about fines? What about No-Mow May? What about we encourage folks to replace lawns with native plants, or vegetables, or as the Brits sometimes do because nobody minds, weeds (good for the environment)? Or whatever we want, because this is my house and AN ENGLISHMAN’S BRIT’S HOME IS HER CASTLE?
I got no reply. Clearly, I am a lazy bee-hugging loon. And a foreigner. And politically very hard to figure out.
An American Encounters British Gardens
A few days back, I messaged my American Friend Now Living In England (AFNLIE, or Affenleigh) for another perspective. Affenleigh has only been over there a few months, so she’s still living the Masterpiece Theatre Dream (wandering around castles, scoffing fish and chips, etc.) But Affenleigh is also starting to discover the Ugly Truth about us Brits, on her immigrant journey toward discovering that we’re actually good sorts she will come to love.
I asked Affenleigh what she thinks of English gardens. “The gardens here are so tiny and unkempt,” she wrote. “The embracing of weeds drives me crazy. I was naive in thinking everyone has a proper English garden! Most just have patio pavers and weeds.”
I broke the news to Affenleigh that patio pavers and weeds ARE a proper English garden. I exaggerate, because I have known Brits who cultivate the kind of lovely ideal gardens that open occasionally to the public for charity. I also know garden-mad Brits who have embraced weeds in recent years, because they care deeply for the environment. Anyway, they never did fixate on lawns. I do know a retired Englishman who was a professional landscaper, and now mows stripes into the little lawn he cultivates in the otherwise wild and beautiful Scottish Highlands. But that's weird.
On the upside for Affenleigh, while lawncare in America was a weekend-long project for her and husband, even with a riding mower, garden work in her new English garden takes, she says “all of 15 minutes”. More time for castles, fish and chips, and getting to know the locals! Put the kettle on! There’s a lesson in that.
WAIT, Laing, you say. What makes you think that the Brits are right, and Americans wrong? That’s snotty. This is just a transatlantic cultural difference.
I’m treading carefully here, because I have news that’s going to be hard for many of my American readers. Very hard. Steel yourselves for the rest of this post. Look, I do get it, because how you think keeps rubbing off on me.
On visits back to the UK, I have to relearn that a car parked in front of a house on what was once a garden, a bunch of weeds, or a lawn with dodgy edges, is not an indicator that the person inside has moral failings. One of my best friends in England, a keen gardener, is now letting her garden go largely wild, to serve the insects on whose pollination we all depend. Another keen gardener I know, in the highlands of Scotland, sometimes plants lovely flowers, and grows all her own vegetables, but also lets most of her property grow wild, because why wouldn’t you, knowing what we know now?
I enjoy relearning to think like a Brit each visit, because, honestly, it’s a useful reminder to ask why we all think what we think. In America, and especially here in the Midwest, an imperfect lawn is seen as a moral failing. When No-Mow May was introduced (to help save bees, remember) in another Wisconsin city, not so long ago, one council member accused people of being lazy, of just not wanting to mow their lawns.
This isn’t just about “when in Rome”, because the stakes are high. That’s one reason why a beautiful lawn is no longer a life goal for a small but growing number of Americans, like my neighbor. You see, quite honestly, there’s no rational reason to put so much time, money, and stress into lawns, and especially not front lawns. While keeping an absolutely perfect rectangle of grass in pristine condition in front of your house might seem obviously the proper thing to do, just the way things are, it isn’t. Certainly not around the world, and not even in the US for most of its history. And it all matters, because lawns actively harm. There. I said it.
The Mysterious Origins of the American Lawn Obsession
Turns out, I wasn’t the first non-American to scratch her head over American lawns. Lawns are a British tradition, true, but not like this. American lawns are not from Asia, Africa, Latin America, or Europe, either. West Africans brought swept dirt yards to the American South, where they were helpful in keeping snakes from hiding. Swept lawns were adopted by Southern whites, too, and were normal for most people in the Deep South until the last few decades, because it’s always a struggle to grow a lawn there.
So how and when did Americans start to have a thing about perfect front lawns? If you're finding this question triggering, consider this: Tradition isn’t what we think it is, something passed down on gold tablets, unchanged, across the generations. Tradition is what we grew up with. A lot of Americans since WWII grew up with the ideal (if not the reality) of perfect front lawns.
Couldn’t afford to keep up a lawn in the 1960s or 70s? You put down astroturf, or fake grass. Or you glued a weather-resistant hideous green carpet to the steps leading to your front door. Or you scattered a layer of green chips of plastic over the front yard. Or you paved your front garden and painted it green. Put like that, it’s a bit nuts, the lawn thing, isn’t it? Why, yes. Yes, it is.
When, why, and how did Americans get obsessed with perfect front lawns? How did front lawn obsession, with our own lawns and those of our neighbors, become part of who Americans are? The answer, as American historian Virginia Scott Jenkins explains, is complicated.
Let’s go back to a time before lawns.
Lawns: The Before Times
In colonial America, a modern American lawn just wasn’t possible.
Why? You needed lawnmowers that hadn’t yet been invented. Grass seed suitable to America that hadn’t yet been bred. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides that didn’t yet exist. Even the idea of a lawn, much less a perfect lawn, didn’t even start until well into the colonial period.
America wasn’t a likely place for lawns to thrive. Nowhere in America, before the arrival of Europeans, were there sturdy grasses for lawns or for feeding animals. No wonder: Indians at the time of contact weren't lawn enthusiasts, and herds of large domesticated animals were an Old World import. True, native grasses grew around most Indian villages, but these didn’t provide nutritious feed for European sheep, goats, horses, and cows, because why would they?
The onslaught of European herd animals put an end to most native grasses in the East. If a deer stomped a native grass, the bit of grass probably took an aspirin, had a lie down, and then picked itself back up. If a herd of cattle regularly thundered over this same delicate American grass, it didn’t recover. It became, as Monty Python might put it, ex-grass. Unlike the prairie grasses in the American West, which evolved to cope with thousands of buffalo, Eastern grasses just weren't used to this kind of abuse.
Tucked into the crevices of the cattle’s hooves, meanwhile, was mud dotted with stowaway European weed and grass seeds. So in one stomp, a cow might destroy a delicate American grass blade, and replace it with the seed of a tough European invader that was more used to rough treatment.
But such accidental imports weren't enough to feed European animals. Colonists soon asked that everyone coming from England bring grass seeds. What Samuel and Hannah stuffed into their pockets for the voyage wasn’t enough, either.
Enter the Shakers! Around the time of the American Revolution, this religious, yet entrepreneurial group (a frequent combination in the States, more about that another day) began developing and growing first-rate grass seed for northeastern climates. And the growing supply of high-quality grass seed opened up the possibility of lawns for parks and homes.
There was now a way. But was there a will? Did most people think, Ooh, wonderful! Time to get me a fancy front lawn, and a new scythe to mow it with? Not yet.
Lawns became popular among the super-rich in 18th century France and England. The 18th century English aristocracy were becoming very, very wealthy by investing in, say, (just a random example) slavery. Now they “enclosed” (grabbed) land. This land had traditionally been available to everyone, from rich to poor, for fuel and grazing animals. The enclosers now hired landscape architects to create massive private parks purely for their own fun.
Lancelot “Capability” Brown (great nickname) was the most successful of these English lawn and garden experts by far, and we still see his work at historic English mansions today. He transformed thousands of acres of land into (imperfect) lawn, on much of which animals grazed, and left, er, fertilizer.
In America, historian Virginia Jenkins tells us, the word “lawn” first appeared in 1733. But there were very few lawns around houses until about the middle of the next century. Lawns in eighteenth-century America were for (you guessed it) posh people. They read about posh European gardens in books, they saw them on visits to England and France, and they fell in love. Thomas Jefferson put in a lawn at his self-designed home ,Monticello. He tucked the service areas, such as kitchens, under the lawn, where he couldn’t see them, or, for that matter, the enslaved people who worked in them. Very Jefferson. George Washington, meanwhile, hired English gardeners, and established a grazing animal-free lawn around his house. Such lawns were inspired for posh American people by posh English people.
By the time of the American Civil War in the 1860s, conditions were right for middle-class people (a much smaller group at this time than you probably think) to plant the grass seeds of the Lawn Revolution.
Americans didn’t spontaneously decide to plant lawns. It wasn’t just a matter of people thinking, “Ooh, lawns look nice. I want one.” They had to have available to them everything they needed to plant and maintain a lawn. They had to be able to afford all these things. Most of all, they had to really want a lawn.
Lawns for More People
In 1776, Americans thought of their country as new. But by the second half of the 19th century, it really wasn’t. American cities were starting to look a bit tatty. Factories and wave after wave of European immigrants were crammed into slum housing.
With the rise of poverty came a rise in crime, plus city diseases like typhoid and cholera. All these things led many Americans to find less appeal in hip, urban living. Ideal living in the second half of the 1800s called for being close to nature, and you didn’t find that in the crowded alleys of Manhattan or Philadelphia. Unless we count rats.
Rural areas suddenly seemed so much more attractive than scary, dirty, noisy cities. So the rich in, say, New York began buying property in the country, close enough to commute to Manhattan on the new railroads. From the start, these “railroad suburbs” were promoted as an ideal way to live.
If you weren’t rich enough to afford your own country estate, then you might (might) be able to afford to move to a country village. You organized your neighbors, also former city dwellers, to spruce up your sad-looking community. Village commons, where longtime locals had always grazed their goats and dumped their trash, now became picture-postcard-ready parks, with tidy lawns.
As for your suburban home? American architects had been promoting detached houses surrounded by lawns as the ideal way to live since at least the early 1850s. And the huge exhibitions (or expositions) that sprang up in America in imitation of London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, the first world’s fair, modeled more ideas for better living, including lawns, to fascinated Americans.
I’ve written a fair bit about London’s Great Exhibition, the original World’s Fair. Like this:
At the Centennial of 1876, celebrations marking one hundred years of American Independence, groves of trees and lawn were planted around America, modeling gardens without fences.
No fences? Like Brits to the present day, Americans had always had fences. Stone walls, markers, rail fences (like in Colonial Williamsburg) kept animals corralled, and made things orderly. Think of Tom Sawyer. Now, in the last quarter of the 19th century, fences were becoming unfashionable. I can’t tell you, as someone who lived in the UK and California (where fences, interestingly, are definitely a thing) how weird I find the South and Midwest, where even our back gardens are open wide to whoever. Very uncomfortable.
In the new fenceless America of the 19th century, country living increasingly meant not living on a farm behind barriers, but in an open park-like garden shared with your neighbors, respectable people like you, in a fence-free lifestyle paradise of lawns.
So, okay, you say. Got it! See it now! Lawns! Thanks, Laing! Oops, is that the time?
Hold your horses, bub. Today’s fun historian word: Reductionist. That means people have a tendency to grab a quick answer to a question about the past like it’s a burger at a drive-through, even though it’s low-quality and bad for us. Historians, however, are trained to resist that urge to reduce everything to a fast answer. That’s why we don’t get invited to parties.
What I have told you does not explain Americans’ obsession with lawns.
For a perfect lawn, you first had to adapt English lawns to America. In the early 1800s, an Irish immigrant horticulturalist wrote a lawn “how-to” manual. By the 1840s, landscape architects set up shop to help Americans with their lawns. But only the wealthy could afford to hire experts, not to mention teams of men to cut the grass, using scythes or expensive horse-drawn mowers.
Meanwhile, as lawns were spreading with the suburbs in the 19th century, city life was also changing. Rich city-dwellers were catching the bug, wanting their surroundings to be lovely and green, like the suburbs. The public park movement, led by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, brought huge green grassy parks to busy cities, from Atlanta’s Piedmont Park (Brits: Bruce Forsyth's grandad designed that one), to the most famous of all: New York’s Central Park. And almost everyone who visited these parks started to think: Ooh, I wouldn’t mind one of these at home.
Middle-Class Front Lawn Obsession Starts
Starting right here, you’re going to see our theme of the rise of the Perfect American Front Lawn play out more clearly, and much more quickly. Right after the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted, the city parks guy, also promoted front lawns for people’s houses in his plan for Riverside, Illinois, the first ever official suburb. With this, Olmsted had just invented the classic suburban idea: If you can’t have a mansion surrounded by acres of designer parkland, you can maybe afford a little house surrounded by an acre of lawn, including in front.
This idea— perfect lawns for lots of people— started what historian Virginia Jenkins calls “the front-lawn aesthetic.” Don’t be afraid of that highfalutin’ phrase! Soon, you’ll be trotting it out to everyone. To your obsessively mowing neighbor: “Pretty impressive front-lawn aesthetic you got going there, Barry.” To the Perfect PTA Mom you want to impress/intimidate: “So, Lauren, I hear the front-lawn aesthetic isn’t really still a thing these days. But I bet you knew that.” {casts jaundiced eye over Lauren’s perfect lawn}.
So what is this “front-lawn aesthetic” thingy? It means that, starting in the mid-to-late 19th century, middle-class American tastes (not just rich people tastes) increasingly favored having a neat front lawn. It wouldn’t just make your property look nice, but also the whole street. The whole neighborhood.
People who moved to the first suburbs, outside, say, New York, had at first been encouraged to grow gardens and keep chickens and a cow or two, to help pay for the railroad commute, and to give the kids a neat farm-like experience. But as suburban house lots grew smaller, and as foods were increasingly grown and distributed nationally, more and more suburban families instead chose the “front-lawn aesthetic”. They got rid of the cows and fences, and started raising neat lawns.
Starts. The key word in this whole section of my post is STARTS. Even in the late 19th century, the middle class was small. Americans still thought of front lawns as a new fashion, mostly for people with money. However, landscape architects were pushing the ideal of a lawn in the books they wrote. The ideal house, what everyone was supposed to strive for, was a mansion, surrounded by rich English- style gardens, and lawns.
Americans didn’t come up with this ideal by themselves. Now began the rise of the front lawn, and of industries that didn’t just supply it: They invented it.
Newspapers and new-fangled glossy magazines needed to sell copies, and so they ran articles on gardens, pushing the front-lawn aesthetic. By the turn of the 20th century, more and more middle-class people (still not a big group!) worked in offices, not on farms. They had more free time in which to gobble up articles on gardening, including lawns, even if they didn’t yet have their own.
And it was going to take a lot more than wanting a front lawn, or even owning a front lawn, to have a proper front lawn. It was going to take . . .
A lawnmower.
The first lawnmower? Invented in England, 1830. But it wasn’t very good, and not many were made, because the demand was not there. Even wealthy people didn’t usually buy a lawnmower, not at first. After all, that’s why one had servants with scythes and missing limbs, dontcha know?
And then, big-ass agricultural mowers turned up in the mid-19th century US. Some had debuted in the American section at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. And the big mowers’ arrival happened at the same time as the rise of the American front lawn aesthetic. As tools, seed, and information on growing a perfect lawn spread, the front lawn aesthetic also continued to spread.
Writers urged Americans to have a neat lawn, and to shame any neighbors who did not. Yes, lawn peer-pressure, even lawn bullying, was now invented. An example: A book published in 1870, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent [or, if it were published today, Making Your Little Suburban Yard Beautiful for Idiots]. The author mocked homeowners for planting shrubs and trees and flowers in their front yards but “neglecting “ [i.e. not hacking down] the grass that surrounded them.
Now, this doesn’t mean that everyone now took up lawn shaming in 1870. But the idea of lawn shaming had been invented.
The new lawnmowers made it possible to mow a small lawn so it was smooth, just like rich people’s lawns. But they didn’t make it easy. Mowers were expensive, heavy, and hard to use. But interest was growing, and equipment was improving by the turn of the twentieth century.
As lawnmowers became better and more popular, and lawns became more common, standards started to rise. If you wanted to be posh, er, respectable (same thing), you AND your neighborhood now needed not just lawns, but perfect lawns. That created demand for even more perfect lawns, as the standard and the obsession increased. You needed to focus on your front lawn, the one you never use, but the one that most people see!
There were fortunes to be made supplying Americans with a perfect front lawn. And even greater fortunes to be made persuading Americans that only a perfect front lawn was acceptable, and constantly raising the bar on what “perfect” meant.
Increasingly, new suburbs got water on tap, and that led to—yes! —lawn sprinklers. The first sprinklers? 1871. Now, if you had a lawn, it didn’t have to go brown, and you didn’t have to water it yourself. By 1900, local governments were already worrying about sprinklers guzzling city water during droughts.
1900? Really? Yes, really. There was already trouble in suburban paradise in 1900. And this was just the start, even as lawns became more and more popular.
So. We have seen how the rise of the American lawn was made possible: By commercial production of grass seed, by the invention of the home lawnmower, by people starting to move out of cities into suburbs, and by the example of the wealthy, shared in mass-published newspapers and magazines, and big expos helping to spread the front-lawn aesthetic (don’t you just love that phrase?) We haven’t yet got to where guilt, embarrassment, and shame are part of the lawn story, but we see that the idea had been (sorry) planted.
Before American Lawn Obsession really took off, there was one more major factor at play (literally) that I want you to know about: Golf.
Scotland’s Sport and America’s Lawns
I used to play golf, you know. I am Scottish, after all. Admittedly, I suck at it. I’m not a golf spectator, either. Back in the 90s, however, I was given a ticket for one of the practice rounds of the Master’s Tournament. My two memories of that day: Tiger Woods. And that grass. The Augusta fairway was absolutely perfect: Lush, thick, green. I could have eaten my dinner off it, if I didn’t mind choking on grass and slurping down stunning amounts of chemicals.
In Scotland, I had never seen anything like that fairway, not even at St. Andrews, home of golf, where my Dad and I played a round back in the 70s. Scottish links courses, like St. Andrews, are the originals. They're on the coast, along the dunes, a natural environment. They started with posh people like Mary Queen of Scots bashing a wee leather ball stuffed with feathers around the sand dunes with a funny wooden club filled with haggis fur (okay, that last thing about haggis fur is a lie. Haggises have feathers.) (okay, that’s a lie, too) (look up haggis).
Links courses still look natural today. Mostly. But are Scottish courses really that different from American courses now?
I know no better golfer to ask than a pal in Scotland I'll call Ma Carnoustie Golfing Lady Friend, or, for short, MacGolf.
MacGolf has played all around Scotland (and won actual tournaments). She has also spent a lot of time chasing the wee ba’ aroond the US.
I asked MacGolf to explain the differences between American and British turf on golf courses. She launched into a highly technical explanation of transatlantic golfing experience differences. I think I got the gist of it. So. In Scotland, the course is more natural, and barer, with thinner flatter grass. There, you can hit a ball high, and still expect it to run when it lands. In America, where the grass is super thick, if you hit it high, you expect much less movement after it lands.
Something else from MacGolf: Scottish golf courses do use plenty of chemicals these days. When one important tournament came to a certain links course, she assured me, they held off on the chemicals ahead of time for the full, expected Scottish experience. And as soon as the tournament was done, out came the lawn chemicals again.
This is very disappointing. Like swanky club houses and fancy Guest Relations Desks at golf courses, the American lawn aesthetic has migrated to Scotland.
In the 20th century, golf, more than anything, spread across America the belief in perfect lawns, what historian Jenkins calls the front-lawn aesthetic. Country clubs (private golf courses) as well as public golf courses popped up in suburbs that didn’t otherwise have parks, and these sweeping golf courses were the heirs of “Capability” Brown’s work. If you lived in the suburbs, then, you got a grand park, but unlike city parks, you had to belong and play golf to enjoy a golf course. This also likely meant you needed a lot of money. And likely you were a guy. And white. And not Jewish. Did I mention that private golf clubs were very discriminating in their membership policies?
The first American golf course, named for St. Andrews in Scotland, opened in a cow pasture (mind your feet, gents!) in suburban New York in 1888. By 1902, there were over a thousand golf clubs (the organizations, not the ball-bashing stick) in the US. Most golf courses were still pastures, which clubs rented out to farmers for grazing. This helped keep the grass mowed and fertilized, for free, but had unfortunate side effects. KEEP WATCHING YOUR FEET, GENTLEMEN! In hot places, like the South and California, putting greens were repeatedly destroyed by weather and heavy use: Sawdust, even the hulls of cotton seed, were used for greens, instead of grass. Golfers weren’t happy. They wanted lawn. Good lawn.
By the turn of the 20th century, the front-lawn aesthetic was now spreading across the land. To be fair, this wasn’t all about golf. This was partly the work of the new Garden Club of America, which grew out of the City Beautiful Movement.
The idea of the City Beautiful Movement was to spread middle-class values among the cities’ poor (most of whom were immigrants), and to make cities attractive places for the rich and middle class to live again, or at least attractive enough for suburban commuters to work in, with grand city halls, parks, and so on.
Influenced by the City Beautiful Movement, the Garden Club of America wanted everyone, including poor people, to have nice, tidy, attractive gardens. They held contests for the best yards. During the early twentieth century, when there was massive inequality, and much conflict between rich and poor, these contests were seen as a way to ease tensions between workers and management. In Dalton, Georgia, for example, textile factories held contests to see who had the “best” garden. Garden Clubs and others held contests specifically aimed at immigrants, Black migrants from the South, and poor whites.
While economic collapse in 1930s America stopped more people from starting lawns, not even the Great Depression could halt the progress of the front-lawn aesthetic as an idea. Through that difficult decade, Garden Clubs continued to influence how people thought about lawns, and so did the increasingly popular Better Homes and Gardens magazine (notice their mission in the title, to show you what a better home and garden look like, and they will definitely be better than yours . . .)
The third organization pushing the rise of the front lawn aesthetic in the early 20th century? Aha. Here we go: The United States Golf Association. Yes, I was coming back to golf, don’t worry! American golfers wanted nice neat turf, just like they saw promoted for front lawns in books, newspapers, and magazines. The US Golf Association channeled massive amounts of cash into lawn research. And things are just getting interesting.
That’s because the most important organization to get involved in building better lawns and golf courses was the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
How? Why? What? As homeowners and golfers clamored for help growing lawns, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) responded, with (what a surprise!) the encouragement of the US Golf Association (USGA).
Isn’t the US Department of Agriculture supposed to support farms? Food? That sort of thing? Not golf courses, or people’s unproductive front lawns? Quite.
Historian Virginia Jenkins directs us to check out the US Golf Association HQ in New Jersey, which has (yes!) a museum that’s open to the public. It’s also, Jenkins writes, “surrounded by acres of weed-free, insect-free, disease-free grass of a uniform color and height, made possible by . . . decades of research and investigation.”
Who paid for that research? The USGA, of course. And American taxpayers. Let’s remind ourselves once again that the purpose of the US Department of Agriculture is to support farming. How did they end up producing acre upon acre of unproductive ground, whose only appeal is that it looks exactly the same?
The US government has been involved in agriculture ever since Thomas Jefferson brought home seeds and plant cuttings from France. By the time Abraham Lincoln launched the US Department of Agriculture during the Civil War, the soils on the East Coast were exhausted. This became true in the Midwest, too, as NBH’s long-term readers with truly amazing memories may recall from my posts on Louis Bromfield and Malabar Farm in Ohio, or can read with a paying subscription:
Grass is important to farmers: They need healthy pasture for their animals, and that means good quality seed and techniques. The USDA helped farmers with this. As demand grew for quickly-laid rolls of turf for lawns, and farmers began supplying them, the USDA helped with that, too.
Meanwhile, golf arrived in America at the same time as the front-lawn aesthetic.
Golfers were not satisfied with poopy pastures. They wanted proper grass, standardized lengths for easier play on fairways and greens, and what was quickly becoming known as “velvety” grass texture, so a player could predict what the ball would do when it landed. Take note, MacGolf!
With prodding from the US Golf Association, the USDA began experimenting with grasses for golf courses. By 1917, USGA and USDA were collaborating on their research. Strangely, little trace of this work remains in USDA records. Most of the evidence for it is in the archives of the US Golf Association. Jenkins suggests that this may be because some USDA staff thought this work was “inappropriate use of government facilities and money.” Ya think? So why was it happening? I’m sure this is a coincidence, but the President at the time was Woodrow Wilson, the first ever golfing US president.
As fewer and fewer Americans stayed involved in farming, and more and more Americans moved to the suburbs, USDA officials may have seen golf course and lawn research as a way to justify budgets and keep jobs. As the suburbs grew after WWII, golf came with them. And so did front lawns.
You Need a Perfect Lawn, or There’s Something Wrong With You!
The guilt. The shame. The stress. The anxiety. We have no idea of the extent to which modern advertising (and its ever-more-sophisticated elder sister, propaganda) has shaped how we think, and who we are as people.
To answer our main question, why did so many Americans adopt the front-lawn aesthetic, and become obsessed with perfect lawns, we have one more puzzle piece, the most important. It’s pretty simple: Advertising got smart. Instead of “Here’s a product, I sell it, and here’s how much it costs”, 20th century advertising now said, “You are inadequate, ugly, unpopular, and lazy. But don’t worry! This product will fix you.”
Before the advertising revolution at the turn of the last century, and especially after World War I, mouthwash wasn’t selling, only unrespectable women shaved their legs, and deodorants were unheard of. You may be thinking Ooh, gross, I’m glad that changed. Thank you, Madison Avenue! But why do you think that?
You look at me in disbelief. It’s obvious, Laing.
No, it isn’t obvious. Not at all, as anyone who has lived in other, different cultures will tell you. Advertisers got their claws into America. And the producers of lawnmowers, seed, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers were no exception.
Americans don’t just need front lawns, the Mad Men said. Americans must have “velvety” turf for their front lawns. Smooth, thick, luxuriant, like a carpet for the outdoors. Evenly mowed, no insects, no brown spots, no diseases. Perfect.
Of course, no amount of advertising matters if you can’t find the product. Enter the Sears, Roebuck catalog. It was the Amazon.com of its age: Page after page of stuff to buy. You could order anything for your house and garden, even the house (flatpack houses, no kidding. Richard Nixon was born in one). Everything you needed for your lawn was available.
The thing is, most people who got the Sears, Roebuck catalog lived in the countryside, where lawns were still a novelty. How did you reach wealthy city folk and well-off suburbanites, and persuade them to grow lawns and visit hardware stores for their lawn-growing needs?
Remember those new glossy magazines? Manufacturers of lawn tools, seeds, and so on, advertised in them. Magazines like House and Garden were aimed at upper-class people. But middle-class people read them too, sitting in their little apartments, dreaming of one day owning a perfect house . . . and lawn.
As Americans moved house more in the 20th century, real estate agents emphasized the importance of a house’s “curb appeal.” The idea was that prospective buyers would make snap judgments about you and your house without even getting out of the car. While English houses and lawns (if any) hid behind hedges and fences, American lawns and homes were to be open for inspection, and judgment. Magazines, Garden Clubs, realtors, and even city governments (which were now starting to set rules about lawns) all pressured people to conform to the perfect lawn.
And so did advertising. A lawnmower company had this slogan in its ads: “Always—A Beautiful Lawn Round a Beautiful Home.” Oh, dear, yes, we wouldn't dream of being the exception to that rule. Always.
Increasingly, people’s character was judged by the state of that green grassy rectangle in front of the house. It had to be not only present, but perfect.
Just like velvet. Velvety. Green velvety carpet of grass. Yummy yum yum. As Virginia Jenkins notes, carpets had always been luxury items, status symbols. Now, the middle classes could even carpet their yards with green velvety goodness.
And if you didn’t? Well, you were a slacker, a failure. That, folks, is the greatest fear of Americans, right there. Feeling slightly crazy yet?
Turns out, though, maintaining the oh-so-perfect lawn requires lots of work. And the work was only going to get harder. See those dandelions? They’re not signs of spring. They’re signs of laziness. Of failure. Never mind that digging up dandelion roots is a total nightmare, or that kids love blowing on dandelions. Get rid of them. Don’t use gasoline (a lot of Americans tried that). Get on your hands and knees and dig those vile, evil dandelions out with a chisel. You deserve suffering for not having dealt with them before.
Oh, and use our product to fertilize your lawn. It makes the grass stronger to resist the dandelions. As late as the 1930s, most fertilizers were organic, like cow manure. But suppose it smells, you wonder? That’s what some companies’ ads would soon encourage you to fret about. Especially chemical companies.
Perfect Front Lawns for All! The Mid-20th Century
You know about the 50s in the USA, right? Even Ricky and Lucy, Fred and Ethel, of I Love Lucy, moved out to the suburbs. When WWII ended, American soldiers who had been stationed in California now moved their families West for the fantastic climate. Even the military bases on which they had served promoted the front-lawn aesthetic: lawns kept down dust, and soldiers mowed lawns.
And if you stayed back East? You had been saving your money during the War (when there was nothing much to spend money on). Now, there are plenty of good-paying jobs. Working-class people also want their own suburban homes with, of course, a front lawn. Oh, and they now call themselves middle class, because they own their own houses, so of course they’re middle class. They snap up little cheap lookalike houses made of cardboard, with big lawns in front, like the one I’m in.
During the war most home lawns had been neglected. With men off fighting and women supporting the war effort, who had time? In 1945, House and Garden published these absolutely gobsmacking words: “The lawn is one of the saddest wartime casualties . . Wait, what? I was agog. Then I read “in the home garden.” They had me worried there. But still.
Now, it was time to take all that energy men had spent fighting the Axis powers, and turn it to fighting weeds! I am not entirely joking. The lawn care industry and its ad men informed everyone that lawns were now patriotic. Neglecting your lawn was unAmerican. Of course, most former apartment dwellers soon discovered that suburban lawn maintenance was a pain in the butt.
By 1960, there were thirty million front lawns in the US, and nearly a half million more every year. The perfect lawn now had a definition, and it wasn’t artsy-fartsy talk about velvety carpet. It was manly talk of technical specs: Smooth, the same color throughout, pest-free, and weedless. That was now achievable, thanks not only to lawnmowers, but a vast array of chemicals, many of them with their origins in 20th century warfare.
Of course you maintained your lawn. You didn’t want your neighbors to suspect that you weren’t really middle class, that you didn’t truly belong in your suburban neighborhood.
And meanwhile, these lawns were transforming much of America into a lifeless savanna that was rarely or never enjoyed, that sucked up water, was devoid of native plants and creatures (the ads and the companies they represented even attacked earthworms at one point). It was all soaked in chemicals that we now know lead to cancer. I’m looking at this out of my window, right now. Perfect velvety front lawns.
Find Out More
This post is my interpretation of Virginia Scott Jenkins’s The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession. This is, to my knowledge, the only history book on this exact subject, although a reader has let me know about Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are by Paul Robbins. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but FYI. Jenkins’s book is well written, and while it’s dense, it’s packed full of tasty info and ideas. So if the subject of lawns has intrigued you, go read it. If you ARE Virginia Scott Jenkins, or another academic specialist, and you spot any mess-ups on my part, let me know.
This post first appeared in February, 2022, and it’s just one of more than 530 plus still very fresh posts I’ve written for Non-Boring History. Nonnies, paying annual and monthly subscribers, have access to them all. They also reliably get all my newest work, on most Saturdays. Join us, for these and so many reasons, including that, if you read regularly, it’s the right thing to do: Writers can’t live on fumes. Joining is quick and easy, cheaper by far than a coffee habit. Details here: