Book Shelf: ‘Lawn’ by Giovanni Aloi
Academic, sarcastic and enlightening: How the mown lawn became sacred.
On Sunday, I had the particular pleasure of laying cardboard and a thick layer of mulch on top of a length of grass along the fence line out back (aka sheet mulching) — another 30-odd square feet of grass vanquished. After starting out here with nothing but grass — the most glorious grass you’ve ever seen, if you’re into grass — we have deliberately let it go. We neither water it nor poison it, so it’s a weedy ‘mess’ after three summers of ‘neglect’ and that’s ok with us. My long-term goal is for there to be no turf grass on this property, or at maximum a small square of it directly in front of the house, but it will take years of gradually planting and suppressing and shading it out. And it raises the issue of how to responsibly maintain it in the meantime. Coincidentally, as I was eliminating the latest little patch this weekend (among other garden chores), I was intermittently reading Giovanni Aloi’s pocket-sized treatise, Lawn, which I’ll now eagerly be pressing on anyone I think might be willing to read it.
I had picked it up and put it down a few times in recent weeks, finding it initially more academic than I wanted it to be (and lol’ing at his indignation about tree- and forest-lovers), but this weekend I became completely absorbed in it. I am perfectly aware that my animosity toward the grass has layers: I don’t want to maintain it; I want to do better by the planet and the pollinators; but also on some level it just invokes for me suburban uniformity, which I struggled against as a misfit suburban kid. In 105 small-format pages, Aloi filled me in on the 800-year history of that particular vehicle of conformity.
There’s been a battle going on here between the town of Catskill (presumably initiated by some peeved residents) and a woman who has converted her front yard to a pollinator garden. She’s been ordered to “clean it up,” and it’s anyone’s guess how “clean” is clean enough. This, of course, is not a rare case. With awareness rising that lawns are, as Aloi indelicately puts it, “the equivalent of skin cancer on the face of the Earth,” it’s happening in cities and towns everywhere as people replace their grass with beneficial plants. (Everywhere, that is, where HOAs haven’t preemptively outlawed anything other than weed-free, designated-length grass to begin with.) So thoroughly indoctrinated are we into the moral and aesthetic superiority of a well-maintained lawn that city ordinances and social mores both favor literal poison and loss of ecosystem over the needs of humans and other creatures. And so we collectively have to rethink it and, sadly, battle over it.
Aloi is a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, and my favorite part of the book is the last chapter where he talks about several progressive, artist-led ecological projects of recent decades. But the real revelation comes from his summation of the twin roles of art and colonialism in the elevation of the mown lawn to the highest echelon of landscape respectability. The whole small book is a deep dive into this, but there’s a nutshell version in these two sentences: ‘As Tom Stoppard wrote in Arcadia: “English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters” [Aloi traces this path back to at least the Renaissance] “who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour.”’
Lawn is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series of small books on seemingly mundane subjects. Synthesizing numerous other texts — there’s a 15-page bibliography — Aloi considers grass through the lenses of: grasslands, yards, pitches (sports fields), parks, golf courses and buffers (such as highway medians), always tying it back to the lawn. It is academic. It is political. It’s also occasionally judgy and sarcastic, definitely thought-provoking and eye-opening. Full of powerful data points and factoids if you need to marshal them for a neighborhood message board debate or town hall meeting. And I hope you’ll give it a read. I’d love to discuss it with you below!
BOOKS IN THIS POST:
• Lawn by Giovanni Aloi
• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (so happy to be reminded of this one!)
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