The sound of summer in my neighborhood is the sound of lawns being mowed. Sometimes it seems that there’s a power lawnmower going, within earshot, nearly every daylit hour from May through October.
But not this year. This year’s near-constant sound has been the drumbeat of the monsoon-like rains, and lawn mowing has become an exercise in strategy. The trick is to mow your lawn when the grass is (a) long enough to bother with and (b) dry enough not to clog the mower. And you have to get to it before (c) it grows so long, stimulated by all the rain, that you might as well (d) hay it and bale it!
I’ve been lucky, so far this year. I’ve managed to slip in mowings between the rain storms, though right now the grass in my back yard is ominously long and ominously wet, and more rain is predicted.
Why do we mow lawns anyway? I’ve spent some time thinking about this, as I walk in ever-decreasing concentric rectangles, pushing my own buzzing, whirring, pollution-emitting mower around the yard. And apparently, I’m not alone. A recent issue of The New Yorker had a long article on the subject that blamed the whole lawn-mowing phenomenon on the 19th century landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing and his followers.
They were landscape designers who liked lawns because they were neater and greener – and a lot grander – than the rough-and-tumble mudlots and woodlots that surrounded most American homes of the day. And their ideas got passed down through the developers of such suburban tracts as Levittown, Pa., where every house had its little square of green and homeowners agreed by covenant to mow weekly all summer long.
Now, according to the New Yorker article, if you count in golf courses (and why not? They’re all grass and just as artificial) lawns cover some 50 million acres of the United States – an area roughly the size of New York state. That’s a lot of lawn to mow!
Predictably, a reaction has set in, and lawns are now seen as environmentally undesirable. One critic even goes so far as to call them "truly evil."
That might be overstating the case. But lawns do undeniably cause a lot of pollution, because of the gasoline for the mower and the chemicals some people dump on them to kill bugs and encourage growth.
I don’t do lawn chemicals, and so my little spread of greensward is pretty ratty – patchy and interspersed generously with dandelions and other weeds. I basically like it that way. Long live the weeds!
I have used a vegetable garden and a stone patio to cover half my back yard: no mowing there. And I’m currently plotting ways to reduce the acreage I mow out front. I’m quietly letting Bishop’s weed edge in, and one source I read suggested a moss garden to replace the lawn.
My front lawn is already pretty mossy, since it’s composed of Montpelier’s finest clay and is shaded by two large soft maple trees. With a little encouragement, I might be able to establish a nice big moss garden there.
And then another couple of hours a month will be mine, all mine, and not the mower’s. Those mossy patches are looking better all the time.