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By the last quarter of the 19th century, the lawnmower was comfortably established as a part of gardening life. On even the most modest properties, a good, well-cut lawn became the ideal. For one thing, it was a way of announcing to the world that the householder was prosperous enough that he didn't need to use the space to grow vegetables for his dinner table.
Today for many people gardening is about lawns and almost nothing else. Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature – namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff on to it. In the western US about 60% of all the water that comes out of taps is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides – 32m kg of it a year – that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.
I think that even more than the water and chemicals what bugs me is that lawn comes at the expense of produce. If only half our lawns were given over to vege patches the amount of food miles that we all consume would be dramatically reduced.
