By Roy Blount, Jr. | June/July 2009 | Due South

Is Grass Still Green

In defense of the good old-fashioned lawn

You’re supposed to eat your yard now.

That’s the new thing: “the edible landscape.” Plant broccoli instead of a lush green lawn that sucks up incalculable scarce water and expensive time—for what?

Well, it does look nice. A swath of green is a pretty thing to surround a house with. I’m just saying.

I would follow Michelle Obama anywhere. If she’s out there on the White House lawn ripping up zoysia and planting root vegetables, I’ll get with the program. My green-thumb wife and I have already devoted a good third of our yard to vegetables (and flowers, trees, bushes, rock cairns, a concrete frog, and a bottle tree). I wouldn’t be surprised to find that we have put in a crop of soybeans on the roof.

We do have some lawn left, though. If we lived somewhere so hot and dry that keeping grass alive required piping in water from a different time zone and fussing with pH levels and waging war with fungi and so on, I would have abandoned the whole concept of greensward decades ago and told the kids to build dirt castles. Having always lived in more or less temperate zones, however, I can’t see a bit of lawn as a rapacious, la-di-da indulgence. I didn’t grow up luxuriously, but I did grow up running around, lying around, and poking around in grass. I don’t know what kind of grass it was—a mixture of Bermuda and crab probably, and clover, dandelions, and miscellaneous weedlets—but it was hardy, it was part and parcel of home, and it felt too good to my bare feet for me to ever breathe the first bad word about it.

Go ahead, tell me that nobody in this country had heard of such a thing as a lawn till the eighteenth century, when rich gadabouts started coming back from jaunts to England, doncha know, with tales of posh estates blanketed by uniform short green blades tended lovingly by groundskeepers, scythe-wielding peasants, and sheep. Tell me that lawn-quality varieties of grass were alien to these shores, had to be brought here against their will. Tell me about the social pressure that kicked in: Before long everybody who didn’t have a lawn was trash. Tell me that the reel push mower (according to american-lawns.com) was “patterned after a machine used…for shearing the nap on velvet.”

I know. A lawn isn’t natural. Neither is a house.