Years ago, I wrote a bit of satire for Flak Magazine entitled The Perfect Lawn:
There’s nothing like waking up to the roar of a Shindaiwa EB250 leaf blower pumping lawn detritus through your bedroom window at 166 mph. Every Monday it’s my urban reveille, followed by a tear-jerking plume of fuel exhaust from a Pony Tiller.
The Los Angeles slang for this morning routine is “mow, blow and go,” a phrase that could imply activities of ill repute. Instead, it’s horticultural shorthand for that wham-bam style of gardening where a quick reshuffling of leaves and some radical turf scalping constitute property maintenance.
My full rant on lawn culture is here.
Those words were inspired, in part, by a neighbor and his overzealous mowing and pruning. His demeanor was a cross between Joan Crawford and Frank Booth. So it follows that his gardening style would be abusive and delusional.
The final straw for me was waking up to the clamor of a chainsaw decimating the lone tree left on his lawn . . . the safe haven of a Northern Mockingbird for the years we lived in the adjacent building.
Northern Mockingbird - ©ingridtaylar
I stumbled out, pre-caffeinated to chat with Mr. Booth Crawford about his new landscaping, find out if there was any hope for the Mockingbird’s tree. He said he didn’t like the leaves on the lawn. So it came down.
This was a tree that barely shed. It had already been carved into a topiary lightbulb, so it had just enough leaves and maybe one branch for the solitary mockingbird.
We never heard the mockingbird sing again after that morning. He moved on. And so did we. We’d been living on terrain too paved and distant from the chaos of nature we both loved. The one sanctuary I created on our shared back porch– with an uncontrollable bougainvillea and ficus, and an organized melee of butterfly blooms — suffered the same fate as the tree. Not a week after we moved out of our rental place, our own landlord clear-cut the garden we’d spent four years nurturing. The same garden that, in the space of 50 square feet attracted (easily) 30 species of wildlife.
Our LA Garden Gone Wild - ©ingridtaylar
The Lawn Fascination
I admit I didn’t question the concept of lawn most of my young life. It’s an obvious source of enjoyment for kids, a place to dig in the toes and ground yourself with the terrain. But the moment I settled in California and recognized the lunacy of irrigating huge swaths of green in an arid climate, my perspective, at least locally, shifted. Warren Schultz wrote an entire coffee-table book on the human/lawn obsession called, A Man’s Turf: The Perfect Lawn. It’s about lawn . . . and mowers . . . and grass varieties . . . and the marketing that has lured folks into the realm of the buzz-cut turf. The association between lawn and luxury is undeniable, going back to English estates and their emulations here.
The ability to sell those associations (or market any commodity) is something worth exploring in an unrelated but fascinating BBC documentary called The Century of Self. (The link takes you to a video clip/teaser.)
But the 21st century begs for more nature-friendly models of gardening. Well, I always thought the 20th century begged for those, too, but here we are, nine years into the next millenium and still . . . those lawn addictions are tough to break.
Today, I saw a piece by Linda Greider in the Washingtonian entitled For the Birds. The opening lines were enough to make me read on:
If birds ruled the world, here’s what they’d do: First, they’d advise human operators of mowers, pruners, leaf blowers, and sprayers to back off a little.
Actually, if we asked the birds, not only would they ban chainsaws and mowers, they’d have a thing or two to say about spring-time tree trimming, .22s and air rifles, single-hulled oil tankers, and reflective windows. When you consider that the fate of our planet might have been altered by birds being able to argue their position, in our language, someone like me can’t help but wish that goldfinches had a grasp on participles and gerunds.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Well, I can’t say I completely disagree with you about lawns, especially in places like Palm Springs and Arizona. However, my Robins, sparrows, squirrels and even Dark-eyed Juncos and Black Phoebes loved my lawn and the accompanying bushes. Grubs, worms and bugs thrived on my lawn, making it a great place to dine.
But, there is a balance. As mentioned in the Post article (of which I only skimmed) we did have a varied landscape. Lots of trees and bushes and lawn and vines and patches of dirt… ahem. Sadly, no water feature. Water is becoming scarcer and scarcer, and I think you’ll start to see people landscaping natural habitats more and more. I hope.
I love your blog so much it makes me stupid. All I can think to say is stuff like, Wow! I love it! You’re SUCH an amazing photographer and writer. Loved wandering from Pigeon Over Seattle to Balde Interloper to Learning Not to Trespass and on and on. You make even a leaf-blower post interesting, thought-provoking, a joy to read. Love also your LA garden and hard to imagine someone destroying it. Weird world. Better for you being in it.
Hey, Elizabeth. Thanks for coming by . . . and for the kind note! You know, when we left LA, the only thing we missed was the garden and the summer nights. We had a pair of young Scrub Jays who were raised in a tree adjacent to our garden. As they grew up, they returned every morning for treats. In the evening, a huge flock of Bushtits would land in the Bougainvillea, chirp up a storm, then go quiet on cue, the minute I stepped out the door: as in “it’s a human — quiet!” We had Red-tail, in urban LA, who perched on our rooftop antenna. Opossums would creep into that little garden patch at night. It taught me a lot about just how a tiny piece of “habitat” could attract any number of species.