Our love affair with lawns began nearly 150 years ago. At the time it was less a landscaping preference than an attempt to use our yards to express our democratic ideals. Just after the Civil War was fought, America's first suburbs were laid out. The famous landscaper Frederick Law Olmstead (whose most famous design was probably New York's Central Park) started it when he conceived of neighborhoods marked by uniform carpets of flat, mowed green as a way to knock down the walls and open our lives and houses to the world.
The flat green expanse said several things about the ideals of the time.
It was, first of all, neat. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then manicured neatness is a symbol of refinement and culture. The original "suburban" lawn was actually the farmer's field, left full of weeds and stubble when the soil was exhausted. This didn't suit the new class of suburbanites. They wanted respectable yards. As former city dwellers, though, they had no idea what else to do with all that extra property. Lawn covered the stubble and made it look cared for.
It was also a sign of prosperity. We take lawns for granted now, but in the distant past the only people who could afford that smooth carpet of green were those with enough servants to keep it trimmed. The poor had dirt-swept yards, or a jumble of plants and vegetables, or maybe just weeds. With the invention of the lawnmower in 1830, lawns became available to the masses - or at least the more affluent masses. Live-in gardeners were no longer necessary, and pushing the mower across the yard was a lot more pleasant than the daunting prospect of using the scythe. Thus we were able to borrow a bit of the glory of the nobility of England for our own yards, while at the same time congratulating ourselves and our neighbors on the fact that we had achieved a democratic uniformity in our front yards.
The flat lawn, as a change from walls and fences, symbolized openness. It signified to the world that our lives were open to view; that we had nothing to hide, but it also signaled that we were available to others rather than locked away from them. Besides, knocking down the walls shows off our house - the single largest expenditure that most of us make in a lifetime.
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