Sod. Spray. Water. Mow.
Once the ultimate symbol of middle-class American prosperity, a lush green lawn has become the suburbanite's albatross (except for those stubborn lawnatics). And it's not exactly Mother Nature's idea of good clean fun, either. Isn't it time we got over our lawn lust?
AS A BOY, TOM RODDE used to lie in his parents' front yard and stare up endlessly at the trees and the clouds. He remembers the feel of the grass like a carpet under his feet, his father's grass, the perfect grass of New Canaan, Connecticut. And he remembers the smell of the lawn on the weekends after his dad had mowed it.
Rodde, 46, remembers the disparaging remarks about the neighbors' lawns, too -- "those little offhand comments parents think you don't hear, but you do." So now, as a homeowner and a dad himself, he says it's a bit of a relief that his yard in Hamilton can't be seen from the road. "At least we don't have the neighbor thing to deal with."
It's not that Rodde doesn't want a nice lawn, that emerald expanse from his childhood. But after he and his wife finished rescuing their 300-year-old house from disrepair, there wasn't much energy or money left over to upgrade the acre and a half of grass that came with the place. Plus, he works 60 hours a week as a financial analyst, commutes 50 minutes each way, travels frequently, and has three children who want -- no, expect -- him to be there for their basketball tournaments and dance recitals.
"My father loved that stuff, and he did it until he was basically too old to handle it," Rodde says. "But I have more important things to do with my time than spend four hours on a Saturday mowing the lawn. It's boring."
There was a time in our country when the love of the lawn and the lifestyle of the homeowner were perfectly in tune, a time when dads came home from work on the 5:05 train and mowed the grass dressed in neatly creased and cuffed khakis while the kids played ball out front. But that's long past. Now Dad is working late or working out or boxed in by Ford Expeditions on Route 128, Mom's in the boardroom or on the school board, and the kids are practicing their swing at the batting cage. Call it the post-lawn culture.
Except, instead of falling naturally by the wayside, lawn standards keep going up. And so each year, we spend more and more money dumping more and more chemicals onto lawns we use less and less.
All this activity might seem quaintly nostalgic, like sprinkling the bedsheets with lavender water, if we weren't trashing the environment as we go, sucking dry New England's rivers and soaking our own front yards in poison -- or paying someone else to do it. To the environment, a lawn is nothing more than a living desert that contributes little, if any, value to the surrounding ecosystem.
Is this any way to keep up the curbside appeal?
AN ESTIMATED 30 million acres of the United States are covered by homeowner turf, and, to be sure, many of those acres are still cared for by people who love their lawns with the kind of uncomplicated fervor Rodde remembers from his childhood.
"When I was in college, I would think, 'Boy, I can't wait to get a lawn. It's going to be just immaculate,' " says David R. Mellor, a Norfolk homeowner with more than the usual amount of pressure to keep up appearances -- the other lawn he takes care of is Fenway Park, where he's director of grounds for the Boston Red Sox.
He's greened up his windowless cinder-block office at Fenway with wall-to-wall poster-sized photos of the ball field sporting various mowing patterns, and he's equally enthusiastic in speaking of his love of lawns. "Whether it's a backdrop for family functions or just a lush area to feel good under your feet," Mellor, 41, says earnestly, "the lawn is a place to make memories."
Ross Smith, 45, of Uxbridge made a CD-ROM to preserve his lawn memories, complete with soundtrack. As Ray Charles swings into his classic take on "America the Beautiful" in the background, slide after slide flashes on the screen -- 40 pictures in all, most showing a vast green lawn carefully mowed into geometric patterns, with a traditional New England center-entrance Colonial in the background draped in red-white-and-blue bunting.
"Our yard has always flown the flag, not just for the Fourth of July," says Smith, small businessman, industrious homeowner, and avid reader of Mellor's 2001 book, Picture Perfect: Mowing Techniques for Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports. "We take pride in being Americans, and today, unfortunately, with what's happening, more than ever we want to show that."
Smith and his wife grow an acre and a half of grass and some 3,500 flowers on their property, which also boasts a greenhouse and a 68-head underground irrigation system. Their yard is their leisure-time activity. "My wife and I don't go drinking or gambling," Smith says. "We love the lawn and the flowers. That's our hobby."
For a lot of other homeowners, that emotion has hardened into something a little closer to duty than devotion.
Patti Hanford is proud of the look of her half-acre lawn, which backs up to conservation land in Salem. But it's pride undercut with anxiety. Hanford, 35, and her husband, who both work and have two young children, spent a lot of money three years ago leveling their lot, putting in new grass, and installing an irrigation system. "In my opinion," she says, "we have the best lawn on the street, and we work hard to keep it that way."
But the maintenance, which they do themselves, weighs on her. The couple follow the
Hanford can't stop herself from noticing the bare patches in her neighbor's yard. Driving around town, she keeps a mental tally of which homes use a lawn service and which don't. "It's just so apparent. The best lawns we see when we drive down a street have those little flags. With two adults working, it's almost impossible to have a beautiful lawn without a service," she laments.
Then there are the Steven Orrs of the world, the living embodiment of the growing schism between lawn and lifestyle. Orr, a 50-year-old Framingham software engineer, serves on his town's conservation commission, and part of his property is protected wetland. Still, he spends about $1,000 annually on his 2-acre lawn, each season laying down 75 to 80 bags of lime and a couple of gallons of Roundup, Monsanto's globally ubiquitous nonselective herbicide, plus two other weedkillers, a grub-control pesticide, and monthly applications of fertilizer.
Orr's in the market for a new tractor, and he longs for an industrial-quality walk-behind model with a 54-inch cutting roller but will probably wind up with a less-efficient riding unit that his wife can use during the week to help out with the mowing.
Does Orr love this lawn? He does not. He resents the heck out of it, in fact, but he's not about to let it die, either. "Everybody wants a lawn, but they shouldn't," he says. "I maintain mine because I've got it, but it's not something I want to have."
At the same time, he dismisses the suggestion that he cut back on the amount of material he puts on his grass. "You gotta use all that stuff," he says with authority. "You just have to. And I'm in no way trying to maintain a beautiful lawn; I'm just trying to keep it alive."
AMERICANS SPEND around $40 billion annually seeding, weeding, feeding, mowing, and watering grass, our country's largest crop. That's more than $5.25 billion annually on synthetic fertilizers (the ones made primarily with man-made chemicals) and more than $2 billion on the estimated 80 million pounds of pesticides we use on our lawns and in our gardens. Scotts, the world's largest supplier of lawn and garden products, posted $1.91 billion in net sales last year.
By one estimate, all this lawn maintenance takes the equivalent of a 40-hour workweek annually from the spare time of the average homeowner. But it wasn't always like this.
Very few American houses had lawns before the Civil War. In urban areas, houses were built near the street, with perhaps a small garden in front (think Old Town Marblehead, as an example). In the country, buildings were surrounded by pastures, fields, and sometimes a swept-dirt yard. After the founding of the US Department of Agriculture, it set to work developing cultivars of grass that would thrive in different regions of the country, but for use in pastures, not lawns.
But in the 1920s, a big wave of suburban development coincided with a popular surge of interest in golf, says cultural historian Virginia Scott Jenkins, author of The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession. Wealthy homeowners extended the look of the links to their homes by planting lawns, and middle-class wannabes followed suit. At the same time, the growing popularity of groups like The Garden Club of America interjected a moral element into the mix that's still around today. "There was a lot of pressure to have the lawn look right in the front of your house, and we still have that," says Jenkins. "The lawn says something about you personally and morally."
The third big wave in development, after World War II, made the lawn a solid totem of middle-class living. Less-demanding physical labor, rising affluence, and increased home and automobile ownership meant people had the time and ability to work on their lawns. Now the time and ability parts of that equation are missing for many people. However, lawn standards have done nothing but increase in the last half century as housing development has grown, property values have soared, lawn-care advertising budgets have swelled, and irrigation systems have bloomed.
Saddled with a lawn we desire but no longer have the inclination to care for, we turn to shortcuts -- lawn services, automatic sprinkler systems, and what the lawn-care industry calls "convenience products," packaged combinations of, say, fertilizer and pesticides or short- and long-acting herbicides mixed together, products that turf specialists and environmentalists say are ripe for misuse by harried homeowners looking for something, anything to put on their lawns on an overscheduled Saturday morning.
Thus has evolved the trap of the modern lawn: We've been culturally trained to expect a lawn, therefore all houses have a lawn. Unless you're willing to join that tiny percentage of people who actively turn their yard into something else -- a patio, a koi pond, a meadow -- you inherit a lawn along with your mortgage, whether you want it or not.
IN OUR QUEST for the perfect lawn, or even just a passable chunk of grass, Americans are putting far too many things on it, environmentalists say -- too many pesticides and herbicides, some of which are known carcinogens; too much fertilizer, which can run off into lakes, rivers, and bays; and too much water.
An average lawn uses about 10,000 gallons of water annually, which can account for between 40 percent and 60 percent of the average household's total water use. Those inch-high manicured lawns we admire as we drive around town actually need the most water, turf experts say, because they expose the soil to heat and air faster and dry out more quickly. And frequent, shallow watering, the kind we get by turning on our sprinkler systems faithfully for 20 minutes every morning, encourages the growth of a shallow root system, resulting in a lawn that's less able to withstand attack from weeds, pests, or drought.
Water use is the number-one ecological concern when it comes to lawn care in Massachusetts, says Ellen Roy Herzfelder, secretary of the state's Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. Summertime lawn watering makes for low flow in fragile rivers like the Ipswich, Concord, and Sudbury, and fertilizer runoff in ponds and bays, including Buzzards Bay, causes algae blooms.
"We are the Bay State," Herzfelder says. "We have all these beautiful bays and interior freshwater streams and lakes that are affected by runoff and fertilizer. It's an issue that we need to push on."
In eastern Massachusetts, in particular, lawn watering is fast becoming a hot-button issue as density, development, and drought pit town against state and lawn lover against tree hugger.
Redfin pickerel, American eel, and pumpkinseed (a kind of sunfish) all call the Ipswich River home, but watchers are more concerned with what's not in the river -- almost no white suckers or brook trout and none or very few fish that need flowing water to survive. That's because, during drought, there is no flow at all in some parts of the river.
In the spring and summer, at least 15 million gallons of water per day are taken out of the Ipswich River watershed for lawn watering, which is nearly the same amount by which the United States Geological Survey estimates the river system is deficient. In the summer of 2002, thousands of fish died; researchers believe that in the upper portion of the river, no fish survived. According to the rivers-protection organization American Rivers, that kind of crisis put the Ipswich third on its 2003 list of most-endangered rivers in the country.
"The automatic sprinkler systems really kill the river," says Kerry Mackin, executive director of the Ipswich River Watershed Association, an advocacy group. "We're not saying never water, but during extreme low-flow periods, people should use just hoses."
Last year, the state Department of Environmental Protection tightened water-use restrictions for communities in the Ipswich River watershed, but 11 of those 14 cities and towns have appealed their permits rather than comply.
For the short term, regulations are the best, if most controversial, tool that the DEP and advocacy groups have to save the river, Mackin says. But she dreams of a day when environmental awareness will be the motivating factor in water conservation habits. "If people realize that the end goal here is a healthy, beautiful Ipswich River rather than a ditch that's filled with dead fish," she says, "eventually the message will get through."
IF WE ALL WENT away, trees and woody shrubs would eventually take over New England -- not grass. Lawns don't occur naturally in our climate.
But we're not all going away. We don't live in a natural environment, and lawns are an important part of the environment we've created, says Mary Owen, a turf specialist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Extension Turf Program. "Lawns provide coolness; they're an environmental buffer for runoff; they trap and retain nutrients," she says. "Besides, what are you going to do, have a cookout on top of a pile of bark mulch?"
Nobody -- well, hardly anybody -- is urging homeowners to rip up their lawns and put in a meadow (which can be more labor-intensive than grass, horticultural experts point out). But a wide net of community activists and environmental organizations is asking us to consider a gentler alternative to the 2-acre inch-high neon-green carpet: testing our soil, sharpening mower blades frequently, diagnosing pest and weed problems before dumping on chemicals, and getting down, on our hands and knees if necessary, as David Mellor advocates, and actually looking at the lawn before watering it.
There is evidence that that message is beginning to leach through to the suburbs. Russell's Garden Center in Wayland, for example, used to sell the Scotts four-step program but doesn't currently because step two still includes 2,4-D, a pesticide that has been linked to lymphoma in dogs. The garden store still sells plenty of Scotts lawn products -- fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, and grass seed -- but in the past couple of years, there's been a sea change in attitude, says retail manager Bill Winter. Organic products, made with substances that occur naturally, have edged out synthetic products to become the majority seller at Russell's.
"People have become aware of how much insecticide and things like that are being put down on sports fields," says Winter, "and they just carry that over and say, 'If it's bad for my kids on the playground, it must be bad for my kids on my own lawn.'"
Patti Hanford, the Salem homeowner, digs in her heels at the suggestion she stop watering her lawn and let it go dormant in the summer. "What -- let it go yellow, like hay?" she nearly yelps. But when told about the effects of 2,4-D, she says she would reconsider use of the chemical, particularly in the backyard, where her kids and dog play most.
Out in Framingham, Steven Orr, he of the 2-acre lawn, swears he's going to let it all go to meadow, though he hasn't set himself a deadline.
And as for Tom Rodde, the man haunted by New Canaan lawn memories, for now his split-the-difference strategy is to hire a company that uses only organic products on his Hamilton lawn. Long term, Rodde's thinking of participating in another hallowed New England tradition that says spring almost as much as a verdant yard: putting his house on the market. Except that, instead of upgrading, this time he'd be looking for a house on a smaller lot.
He'd want a lawn at the new place, he says, just a lot less of one. It's the American ideal, downsized.
The Lower-Impact Lawn
TEST YOUR SOIL
For $9, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Extension will tell you exactly what your soil needs -- and doesn't need -- to support a healthy lawn. Details: www.umass.edu/plsoils/soiltest/.
USE SUPERIOR SEED
For our region, mix bluegrass with perennial ryegrass and fine fescues like creeping red and Chewings fescue. Avoid annual rye grass.
SHARPEN YOUR MOWER BLADES
Dull blades rip the grass and stress it unnecessarily.
LEAVE THE LAWN CLIPPINGS
They put nitrogen and other nutrients back into the soil.
FERTILIZE INFREQUENTLY
Very-slow-release fertilizers stay in the soil for up to 16 weeks, so one spring and one fall application are sufficient.
MOW HIGH
Set the blade height at 3 inches. The taller grass will shade its own roots, crowd out weeds, and better withstand drought conditions.
GET INFORMED
Check out "More Than Just a Yard: Ecological Landscaping Tools for Massachusetts Homeowners" at the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs' Water Resources Commission website, www.state.ma.us/envir/mwrc/.
WATER LESS BUT MORE DEEPLY
Deep, infrequent watering encourages root growth, while too much water weakens plants and invites disease. If grass springs back underfoot, it doesn't need water.
TAKE CONTROL
Tell your lawn service to avoid unnecessary pesticides or herbicides.
SPRINKLE SMART
If you have an irrigation system, learn how to adjust it or find someone who can. An inexpensive gauge can tell you how much water is actually reaching your lawn.
THINK SMALL
Consider turning some of your lawn into a flower or vegetable garden.
Tracy Mayor's yard is full of mud and moss. Her last piece for the magazine was a profile of novelist Andrea Barrett.
