In “The Heartland,” historian Walter Havighurst focuses on the early settlement of the “Grand Prairie.” He says that once 18th-century explorers reached the Wabash River, heading west and exiting the hilly forests of Indiana, they found the landscape radically changed to a “sea of prairie” and tall grass. Havighurst quotes French explorer Sieur Desliette as saying: “We begin to see here those reeds ... which shoot up to a height of fifteen feet.”
Havighurst also recounts “three land-lookers from Ohio,” who, in 1824, rode into the prairie and its tall grass: “When one of them turned his horse off the trail and rode a few paces into the bluestem [grass], the rest of the party passed him unseen. In the giant bluestem cattle were hidden and a man on foot was swallowed without a trace.”
Of course, this would eventually not do if, say, someone wanted to plat a town and call it Tuscola. Early settlers would want to be able to safely move around town — say, go to the tavern for a few snorts of fermented barley-corn, and get home without stumbling into the giant bluestem, getting lost and possibly blood-drained by mosquitoes the size of sparrows (according to legend).
Settlers also didn’t want their children and pets to wander off into the tall “empires of bluestem and Indian grass” to never be seen again. So the tall grass had to go, which it soon did after being hacked down with the back-breaking manual swinging of scythes and sickles.
Once whacked down to a height that allowed for, say, a parent to not lose their children in the front lawn, the preferred method of lawn maintenance became livestock.
Goats were the preferred livestock to keep the tall prairie grasses under control. This worked well for decades until an increasingly picky public piled into town council meetings, complaining of smelly, bleating goats. So the goats had to go, and, luckily, soon did with the invention of the lawn mower.
Around the start of the 19th century, the first lawn mower, a manually pushed rotary style, arrived in the U.S. By the start of the 20th century, a gas-powered mower arrived, and the dream of most homeowners of having a beautiful house surrounded by a lush emerald green carpet of grass, just like the grand estates in Europe was within reach.
This perfect lawn was promoted in one of the first books on lawn care, “Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds,” published in 1870 by landscape architect Frank J. Scott. Scott told his readers that “a smooth, closely shaven surface of grass is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban home.” An idealized image of proper lawn care was thus born.
I easily bought into this concept of a perfect lawn — weed-free, lush and trimmed as level as a flat-top haircut from the ’50s — largely because everyone else did, plus there were those anti-tall grass and weed ordinances.
Happily, I quickly found mowing to be therapeutic, better than anti-anxiety meds, as it: calmed my jangled nerves after watching cable news reports of the world’s unraveling; united me in oneness with nature; and created a transcendent meditative state that approached the ecstasy of really good biscuits and gravy, almost.
No matter how absurd life seemed at the moment, I could climb upon my set-down mower, attack that scraggly lawn of mine, imagining I was subduing the tall prairie grasses of centuries ago, thereby saving young kids and small pets from wandering off and getting lost, all accomplished without goats.
But the real burst of dopamine came when I’d make my first pass then turn and look back at what I had done: Once scraggly grass was now pool-table smooth, neat and orderly, which stood out against the uncut grass, thus providing immediate physical evidence that I HAD DONE SOMETHING GOOD — a feeling I rarely got at the end of a stressful day as a lawyer.
But now I am advised to wrap my mind around the emergent notion that our idealized lawns of lush grass are “biological deserts,” an “ecological catastrophe” because of the following damages: conventional turf grass is a non-native monocrop that contributes to a loss of biodiversity (bad); the loss of biodiversity means less pollinating plants for our pollinating birds, bees and bugs, which means less food (bad); lawns typically require vast amounts of water (bad), pesticides (bad), insecticides (bad) and gas-powered mowing, which is carbon-belching (bad), etc., etc.
“Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” is a quip that jumps to mind.
So what’s best lawn practice: Native plants with bleating, smelly goats everywhere? A cash crop? Fifteen-foot-tall prairie grass? An Arizona rock lawn?
Whatever. I’m game. Now that things formerly in the stable state of yin are in decline, and the chaotic state of yang is ascendant, why should my (formerly?) perfect lawn avoid the disharmony?
