Lawn Nazis Should Enjoy The Summer Con Lawns Manicured Lawn A Sign Of Pretense

It’s August. Even Congress wants a break. So we pose the question: Is a meticulously tended lawn a thing of beauty? Or is it evidence democracy has gone to seed?<

Show me a meticulously manicured lawn, and I’ll show you someone who has forgotten this nation’s roots.

Well, sure, it is fine for managing editors and other aristocrats to have a yard that looks like the Butchart Gardens. Gives them a chance to return some spending money to the laborers who tend their lawns, manufacture their pesticides and grow their bedding plants.

But how could any average Joe - a guy who ought to know that summer is for hammocks, cold beer and camping - turn into a Lawn Nazi? You know the type. They claim their yard is living space, but that’s mere propaganda. In truth they spend their evenings down on hands and knees, combing and waxing every blade of grass until it stands at attention like a Marine recruit. Their marigolds march in rigid rows on barren battlefields of beauty bark. Their mechanized cannonades of irrigation drain the aquifer. Their chemical weapons could intimidate Saddam Hussein. Their gardens have a future as a Superfund site: “Caution, 2,4-D contamination.”

Back in the good old days, before the yuppification of yards, Americans followed the noble example of the ancient Greeks, who planted their gardens to resemble a wild mountain meadow. Early American yards were a democratic diversity of wildflowers, herbs, vegetables. Our forebears thought of grass as a crop, not a rug. Grass produced wheat. It fed the buffalo. Like the young, vigorous country it waved tall and free, shimmering in the sun, from sea to shining sea.

In Europe, from which our forebears fled in disgust, kings would adorn their castles with the extravagance of clipped grass to intimidate the peasants, who planted their miserable plots with grain and didn’t mow until the harvest.

It was only as industrialization brought time and pretension to the working class that we Americans forgot our heritage and made our yards a scene for urban competition: Mine is greener than yours. But we fool only ourselves. No amount of clipped bluegrass can make split-level suburbia look like a European estate.

We’d be better off to plant our yards with wildflowers and pine. It would conserve our water supply, slash the use of pesticides and give us time. Time for our families. Time to read Homer in the hammock. Best of all, the grass-seed industry and its choking smoke would disappear. The August air would be as crisp and clean as a mountain brook.

, DataTimes MEMO: See the Pro lawns editorial under the headline: Lawns American as ma’s apple pie

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