Undeniably the single most important American contribution to landscape design, the lawn carries on its velvety shoulders images of democracy, egalitarianism, consumerism, civic responsibility, and chemical warfare, to name a few. Its record in the United States, described so eloquently by Virginia Scott Jenkins in her 1994 book, The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, echoes much of that nation's history over the past 150 years and more. And where the U.S. leads, Canada follows.

Forty million acres, or thirty? Whichever way you slice it, these two recent estimates of the amount of turf in the United States surely boggle the mind. Add in the US $10.4 billion spent each year on seed, sod and chemicals, and an untold amount of professional lawn care, and the importance of the American (and Canadian) lawn becomes apparent. Evoking our African origins, we've created a savanna from coast to coast.

Beginnings
Two conditions must exist before you can grow a lawn. First, you must want to grow it, and second, the tools to establish and maintain it must be available.

Although lawns had been popular with aristocrats in England since Tudor times, and in France since the 18th century, only a few wealthy Americans – Washington and Jefferson among them – embraced the practice before the late 19th century. Lawns remained an expensive and difficult proposition.

First is the matter of grass. In the early days, lawns were hit or miss affairs. Only introduced grasses (including Poa pratensis more commonly known as "Kentucky" bluegrass) were suitable and then only in a few areas, primarily the Northeast, where they had long since displaced delicate native grasses in agricultural fields. But two new developments in the 1880s spurred development of new varieties: the explosive development of golf after the first American course was built in 1888 (in New York), and the establishment of government agricultural field stations.

Funded generously by the U.S. Golf Association (USGA), the federal department of agriculture (USDA) embarked on research into turf. From 1910 to 1924 the Arlington Experiment Farm, the Bureau of Plant Industry's main field laboratory (and now the site of the Pentagon), was the centre, but eventually research spread to dozens of stations across the nation. The effort continues to this day. Scott Jenkins maintains that if there hadn't been a cadre of golfers within the USDA in those early years "the domestic landscape of the United States might look very different today."

Next there's the matter of machinery. Livestock and scythes were the only option until Edwin Budding, an engineer at an English carpet mill, developed the first mower in 1830. American patents followed the 1860s on and by 1885 America was making 50,000 mowers a year. But still, the machines remained heavy and unwieldy.

And finally, the desire to have a lawn. Beginning in the 1840s, village improvement societies in New England sought to beautify their surroundings, building on the romantic ideal that beautiful surroundings are part of a civilized society. A neatly cropped grassy common became part of this ideal. Then in 1868 Frederick Law Olmstead, the American landscape architect responsible for Central Park in New York and Mt. Royal in Montreal, designed Riverside, a Chicago suburb. Here for the first time were the winding streets, the detached houses set on wide lawns with no intervening fences to break the visual sweep. Olmstead was not alone, however, and suburbs soon radiated in profusion from the major cities, a reaction in part to the horrors of the industrial city, and helped along by streetcars and the railroad.

An Idea Spreads
The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 exposed millions to Olmstead's design ideas, which spread like wildfire among the middle class. But many other factors soon played a part in the lawn's growing acceptance. Garden clubs and contests, city beautification projects and more, all products of the City Beautiful Movement, "put pressure on communities to achieve new aesthetic standards in domestic and community landscaping." As early as 1870, in a book on suburban landscape design, Frank J. Scott had articulated what would eventually become part of the American psyche, the notion that it's shameful not to keep up your lawn. Homeowners who don't look after their front lawns, he said, are selfish, unneighbourly, unchristian and undemocratic. In time, many cities would enact bylaws, take people to court, and even throw them in jail if they failed to conform.

Between the 1880s and the 1920s the U.S. was transformed into a consumer society. Mail-order catalogues, trade journals and popular magazines flourished, a product of the revolution in publishing. Advertising aimed at the masses promoted both an increasing mountain of garden-care equipment, and (as the 20th century progressed) the ethos that a good family man (never a woman) maintains his lawn. And lawns did become somewhat easier to maintain as new grass varieties appeared; as rubber hoses, sprinklers and city water supply made irrigation possible; and once a shorter workweek and labour-saving devices gave homeowners more time.

The 1920s were marked by the growth of garden clubs, flower shows, and competitions for small-lot design. Dozens of magazine articles and the USDA provided advice. Golf, now a middle-class pursuit, continued its spread across the country, and its players eagerly tended their own lawns. By 1937, despite the Depression, Americans were spending $200 million a year on private lawns.

But it was only after the Second World War, by which time most American lawns were in a sad state of disrepair, that the lawn truly came into its own. The pent up demand for housing, the baby boom, low-cost mortgages for veterans, and the growing affordability of the automobile fueled a huge expansion of suburbia and the beginnings of urban sprawl. Grass was a boon to the developer, a cheap and easy way to cover the ground. Half a million new lawns were added to the nation's total in 1960.

Standards of Perfection
Humans, says Scott Jenkins, have "a tendency to recognize problems only when a solution has been identified." As time went by, manufacturers promoted ever-higher standards of lawn perfection as a way of encouraging you to buy their chemicals, tools, machines and grass. At first only natural methods (top-dressing, manure) were used, but around 1930 researchers began turning their thoughts to fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. The role of pH was discovered soon after (liming became an annual ritual), and artificial chemicals became generally available after the war; the first weed and feed came on the market in 1949. The ethos of better living through science hit its stride.

And here's where warfare enters the picture. Americans have been locked in mortal combat, says Scott Jenkins, for more than 50 years. Chlordane, lead arsenate, DDT – these were our early weapons. Until Rachel Carson opened our eyes, we had little perception of the dangers of the chemicals we were using, and then only barely. Cities joined in the collective blindness, applying the same chemicals and standards of perfection to parks, playgrounds and roadside verges. Golf courses went one further, using water and chemicals in prodigious quantities (think oases of green in the Arizona desert). The Vietnam War added to the arsenal.

But it was still hard to establish a lawn. Enter a beguiling shortcut – a pre-fabricated lawn, either artificial (Astroturf, green concrete), or ready-made in the form of sod, first suggested as an alternative in the 1950s and soon becoming the preferred method. But as our lawns became more and more artificial, new problems appeared – crabgrass, thatch, chinch bugs, and more – all of which needed professional help. Lawn companies proliferated, growing steadily more prosperous through the 1990s.

Inevitably, there has been a reaction. The rise of ecological awareness from the 1960s on prompted alternative landscape ideas – xeriscapes, meadows, the use of native flora – and organic gardening has become increasingly popular. HRM is not alone in restricting the use of pesticides. Yet stuck as we are with large city lots, the lawn is not likely to die out any time soon. For most people, grass remains the easiest option. Let's hope we'll be more sensible about it in the future.