Lawn

History

There is some evidence that manicured grassed landscapes made their first appearance in ancient China. A form of lawn is also associated with English and French elites of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. However, a more prosaic dating of the urban lawn places it with the growing middle class in the late-nineteenth-century cities. Rapid growth of industrial cities and concern for urban morals fueled the emergence of a pastoral idyll. And, whereas a complete removal from the city was impossible for many families, middle-class rural desires were manifest as a suburban, single detached home surrounded by private green space.

These desires depended on the convergence of a number of factors. First, the emergence of commuter travel and later the automobile allowed urban dwellers the necessary mobility to move to suburban homes. Second, the adoption of the eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek meant that people had adequate time for lawn work. Finally, and contemporaneously, the development of technologies such as lawn mowers, irrigation devices (hoses and sprinklers), pesticides, and herbicides, as well as the identification of appropriate grass plants, offered homeowners the means through which lawns could be created and maintained.

Early-twentieth-century advertisers sought to convince homeowners of the moral, aesthetic, and social virtues of owning a lawn. However, in the 1930s, these same advertisers shifted strategies. That is, instead of persuading homeowners of the lawn's appropriateness, new advertisements offered consumers better means to care for a lawn. The implication is that by this time, most consumers were convinced of the appropriateness of the lawn and now needed to be disciplined to care of it. A post–World War II climate conducive to consumerism and the advent of mass suburban development fixed the lawn in discourses surrounding home and property ownership, public presentation, industri-ousness, gender, the nuclear family, and good citizenship. In North America, in particular, yard after yard of unfenced turf bespoke democracy.

Although it is impossible to fix the degree to which lawn covers the Earth's surface, there are some data that illustrate its extent. For example, 2008 estimates suggest that the lawn is North America's largest agricultural crop and that it covers nearly 2 percent of the continental United States. Furthermore, lawn maintenance has become big business. The production of lawn equipment and lawn products produce commodity chains that touch every continent except Antarctica. Global estimates in the early 2000s for lawn-related expenditure range between $22 billion and $35 billion annually. This amount includes the increasing use of professional lawn care companies that range from small (less than $50,000 in sales per year) to large (more than $1 million in sales per year). Estimates suggest that in 2008, more than 80,000 lawn and landscaping companies operated in the United States alone.

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