Oliver Milman is a New York-based journalist and environment correspondent for The Guardian.
When Janet and Jeff Crouch sought to enliven their front yard in suburban Maryland with native black-eyed Susans, Joe-Pye weed, asters and coneflowers, they had no inkling that they were doing anything controversial.
“It was a garden full of life and color,” Janet told me. “It was beautiful.” Her sister advocated for native plants and encouraged them to think about pollinators and avoid pesticides. Their endeavor eventually lured butterflies, bees, goldfinches and sometimes snakes to a thrumming oasis at the edge of Cedar Lane Park in Columbia, Maryland. But it also stirred the anger of a neighbor who, aided by the local homeowner association (HOA), demanded the Crouches revert to the norm. People’s yards are for lawns, they insisted, and little else.
“We got a cease and desist letter from the HOA’s attorney, which was shocking, telling us to rip it all out,” said Janet, who works for the U.S. Department of Health. The neighbor argued that their biodiverse garden was an unsightly mess that was attracting unwanted visitors like deer and rodents to what was otherwise a sea of prim suburban lawns.
“He was fairly sincere that you’re just not supposed to do that,” Jeff told me. “He was brainwashed that we should only have grass.” Janet added: “When we didn’t immediately comply, he started creating all these narratives around us that we were crazy.”
“When Janet and Jeff Crouch sought to enliven their front yard in suburban Maryland with native black-eyed Susans, Joe-Pye weed, asters and coneflowers, they had no inkling that they were doing anything controversial.”
In 2017, the HOA demanded that the Crouches restore their grass lawn or risk fines or worse. The couple was undaunted. A years-long battle ensued. “You can’t let the bullies win,” Janet said. “And that’s what it felt like: We were being bullied on our own property.”
The Crouches had unwittingly stumbled into a little-known battle over tidy neighborhood lawns. Celebrated in modern American suburbia, tended lawns have become a prized avatar of the American dream of home ownership, a key backdrop to neighborhood rituals and a symbol of order and calm and safety — of a good life. The moral rectitude around lawns has been given muscle through HOAs — which govern neighborhoods home to more than 75 million Americans — and town and city ordinances that stipulate how long grass can be and how often people should trim it.
Those who draw the ire of their neighbors by cultivating something other than a grass monoculture can face stiff penalties: Last year, authorities in Catskill, a bucolic town in New York, took a resident to court and threatened her with fines of $1,000 a day for not mowing her pollinator-friendly natural garden.
How did the American lawn become the site of such vicious disagreements? American culture embodies a zeal for individuality and property rights — of the idea that people should be able to conduct their own affairs in their own territory without the neighbors or the government imposing their views and forcing conformity. Like so many other cultural quarrels, the lawn has this deep contradiction at its heart.
The roots of this American obsession with a neat lawn are surprisingly shallow, initially imported from European sensibilities. Defenders of castles in medieval England and France would often cut back vegetation near the fortification to enable clear sight lines of potential invaders, an unintentional aesthetic that was later replicated in grand, sweeping lawns of aristocratic country estates.
Such vistas did not greet the early European colonists in America, with the native grasses on the eastern seaboard mostly broom straw, wild rye and marsh grass — varieties that didn’t have the lush, carpet-like look of those seen in Europe. Native Americans had already altered this landscape for hunting, but white settlers then upended it with the introduction of grazing cattle, sheep and goats that decimated the local grasses and opened terrain for favored types of imported replacement grass.
Paintings of the period often show dwellings surrounded by wildflowers or dirt. Having a vegetable patch or a few animals nearby was more attainable than the back-breaking maintenance required to plant and tame a lawn, which was the preserve only of the wealthy, aspirational elite who could afford teams of scythe-wielding servants. Thomas Jefferson had a celebrated lawn — which comes from the French word “launde,” meaning glade or cleared area — at his Monticello estate, while George Washington employed English landscape gardeners to achieve the same at Mount Vernon.
“Celebrated in modern American suburbia, tended lawns have become a prized avatar of the American dream of home ownership, a key backdrop to neighborhood rituals and a symbol of order and calm and safety — of a good life.”
As the 19th and then 20th centuries unspooled, though, the idealized lawn came within reach for more Americans. The invention of lawnmowers in the first half of the 19th century and, later, sprinklers reduced the amount of labor needed to nurture a lawn, and a new vision of park-like suburbia started to bloom, partly spurred by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect famous for creating New York City’s Central Park. In 1868, Olmsted was tasked with designing one of the country’s first planned suburban communities near Chicago, with each house set back 30 feet from the street and the connected lawns giving the impression of a flowing park rather than the high walls that often separated homes in England.
Within a few decades, a manicured lawn had become a fetishized status symbol. In “The Great Gatsby,” Jay Gatsby is so perturbed by the difference between the lavish grounds of his mansion and the scruffy yard abutting Nick Carraway’s nearby rented house that he sends his own gardeners to tame the unruly patch. “We both looked at the grass — there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began,” Carraway concedes.
Then, as government loans helped millions of soldiers returning from the ravages of World War II to obtain their own homes, the model of identikit suburbia, complete with a swatch of emerald lawn, became the norm. “A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling,” said Abraham Levitt, the pioneering architect who, with his two sons, built the first Levittowns, the planned suburbs that became the desired template for American middle-class life. “It is the first thing a visitor sees. And first impressions are the lasting ones.”
The growing popularity of golf, with its courses’ trimmed grass aesthetic, and the spread of car culture helped push Americans deeper into a cult of civilized lawns. New, hardier types of grass, such as Kentucky bluegrass — which, despite its name, is usually thought to have arrived with the Spanish — became ubiquitous. The lawn care industry began to heavily market an American sense of pride in the home and disciplined yard work as a leisure pursuit. Lawn care became entwined with neighborliness and even a measure of whether the homeowner was a solid, dependable provider. As Ted Steinberg, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University and an authority on the advancement of the lawn, put it in his book “American Green,” “The perfect lawn rose to become an icon of the American Dream.”
“The American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,” Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book “Lawn People,” told me. “There becomes a kind of local social pressure to make sure you’re not letting down the neighborhood — you’re keeping up the property values. Those then become morally normative.”
This devotion has turned the U.S. into the undisputed global superpower of lawns. Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the nation. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn. Each year, enough water to fill Chesapeake Bay is hurled collectively onto American lawns, along with more than 80 million pounds of pesticides, in order to maintain the sanitized, carpet-like turf. In aggregate, this vast expanse of manicured grass rivals the area of America’s celebrated national parks.
It’s a waste of space, Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, told me. More biodiversity on American lawns could soak up carbon, better mitigate floods, support pollinators that propagate our food and host the insects that form the crucial early threads of the terrestrial food web. “But lawns do none of those things,” Tallamy said.
“How did the American lawn become the site of such vicious disagreements?”
The typical suburban lawn is zealously mown, raked and bombarded with chemicals. Flowering plants that would typically appear in an untended meadow are sparse. For insects, reptiles, birds and many other creatures, these places are hostile no-go zones. Closely cut grass is neither habitat nor food for most insects.
Allowing dandelions and clover to sprout in lawns could help support a diversity of U.S. bees, studies have found. In North America, nearly a quarter of all native bees are threatened, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, and native bees are doing much critical pollination.
Lawns that are friendly to insects are critical for a whole cascade of creatures up the food chain. North America’s bird population has shrunk by 3 billion — about one in four of all birds on the continent — since the 1970s. “That’s a genocide, a birdicide,” said Robbins. “And that comes from a cascade of all kinds of landscaping decisions.”
Part of the problem is the myriad of foreign plants that now festoon suburban flowerbeds. Native insects evolved with native plants and cannot feed upon the waves of Bradford pear, burning bush, English ivy, ginkgo and porcelain berry that have found their way to the U.S. Worse, many of these imports become invasive after escaping yards and crowd out other plant life in public spaces. “They are what I call ecological tumors,” said Tallamy. “They get everywhere and are devastating our natural areas.”
Of all the things that Mike and Sian Pugh loved most about the ranch-style home they bought in Loudon County, Virginia, in 2005, the meadow at the rear of the property was foremost. Mike, who is a record producer, enjoyed periodically strolling out of the French doors into the pasture where cows once grazed. It had never been a lawn. The Pughs seeded the field with wildflowers and from their porch keenly watched the birds, deer and butterflies, especially the monarchs fluttering to the milkweed.
“I planted a few things,” Mike told me, “but mostly left it alone. It was a conscious decision — it was one of the reasons we got the house.” He would occasionally battle invasive grasses and mow the field, but he enjoyed the vibrancy of the meadow’s natural state. “When you get to fall and there are 14 different colors of yellow there, it’s stunning,” he said.
But someone complained about the chickens the Pughs were raising, contravening HOA edicts, and the dispute ramped up to include the meadow itself. Some neighbors, Mike told me, felt that the Pughs were not playing by the rules everyone else was: diligently trimming hedges, mowing lawns and painting fences black. It was a matter of fairness, they said.
At heated local meetings, the Pughs were accused of reducing nearby property values. “People would scream at us,” Mike said. “I was called a bully and a ‘fucking liar.’ The first time that happened, it was really upsetting. It became ridiculous. I think these people are huge hypocrites.” As Marcus Lopez, then the president of the HOA, told The Washington Post in 2018, the Pughs “upset a lot of people. There’s a principle involved. If you have one exception, how do you hold a neighborhood to a standard?”
The battle ended up costing the Pughs $40,000 in legal fees over five years. Ultimately, the two sides settled with an agreement in 2019 that the HOA rules would have to change in order to force the Pughs to cut the meadow. The Pughs moved last year to a smaller property in West Virginia, where they feel people are less likely to intervene over vegetation choices.
Resistance to the imposition of lawns has gathered steam in recent years. They are increasingly viewed as a crucible of environmental breakdown. A growing number of homeowners, alarmed by a loss of nature that imperils birds and bees, have started to question whether their lawns need to be closely cut and strafed with chemicals. The National Wildlife Federation has reported a surge in the number of homes they’ve certified as wildlife gardens.
Some laws are shifting in response. After the Crouches came to a settlement with their neighbor and HOA in 2020 — agreeing to restore a strip along the property boundary but leaving the rest of the garden intact — the state passed groundbreaking legislation to curb the ability of HOAs to raze eco-friendly yards.
But as is often the case in the U.S., a change to an old status quo triggered a backlash. Defenders of the idealized postage stamp of emerald lawn aren’t backing down, seeking to overturn reforms aimed at allowing in wilder, more nature-orientated gardens.
Five years ago, Appleton, Wisconsin, embraced No Mow May, an initiative that grew popular in the U.K. that encourages people to ease off on cutting the lawn during May to allow flowering plants that provide nutrition to bees and other animals. But then last summer, Appleton reversed course, reinstating previous requirements for residents to keep grass to eight inches or less during May and instead offering more general pollinator-friendly guidance for a “slow mow summer.”
“The typical suburban lawn is zealously mown, raked and bombarded with chemicals. Flowering plants that would typically appear in an untended meadow are sparse.”
“There was a lot of feedback that it was sort of ridiculous, that we look like a shabby city,” said Sheri Hartzheim, an Appleton councilor who voted for No Mow May to be scaled back. “People were using it as an excuse to not maintain yards. Without rules, there is chaos.”
Hartzheim identifies as a libertarian but told me she considered neat lawns a sort of civic virtue, which she acknowledged could be inconsistent with her usual suspicion of onerous regulations. “I generally think government should stay out of people’s business,” she said. “But we live in a city, and there are rules for a reason; we have to live next door to folks. Letting yards go willy-nilly, having mice and voles everywhere — that isn’t something we should support.”
Grass is not the only thing about lawns that divides Americans. Filipine Hoogland, who advocates for reformed landscaping practices in New York, has been pushing for restrictions on leaf blowers due to their noise and environmental impact. “We get so many aggressive reactions,” she told me. “We’ve gotten death threats. They feel it’s overreaching.”
Hoogland was born in the Netherlands and has spent decades in the U.S. She lamented the American attitude to lawns — “an enigma” to her. “Americans are more afraid of pests, and there is this infatuation with cleanliness — I don’t really understand it,” she said. On landscaping crews, with their armories of mowers and weed whackers and pesticide appliers, she said: “These aren’t gardeners — they are cleaning services. They have no clue about plants.”
“Defenders of the idealized postage stamp of emerald lawn aren’t backing down.”
Tallamy advocates for what he calls “homegrown national parks” — seeding native plants (oaks are an excellent choice for most places, he said) and reducing mowing and chemicals. Lawns can exist in this world, too, just not as the sole representative of green spaces. “It doesn’t mean we have to become slobs,” he said. “We can still have manicured lawns to line flowerbeds or driveways to show it’s intentional. We just have to have less of it. We need more plants and less lawn.”
On talks around the country, Tallamy said he gets a largely positive response to this message. “The culture is changing,” he said. “Just not fast enough. You still see a lot of lawn out there.” Cultural change is messy and can prompt a backlash. It may take the hard-edged limits of a changing environment and unyielding economics for lawns to recede from the norm of American life.
Geography may help. In the U.S. West, severe drought fueled by the climate crisis has spurred cities such as Las Vegas to tear out ornamental grass and reorientate more pragmatically to more parched surroundings. Homeowners in exclusive California neighborhoods have been shamed for dousing their lawns in water. “Water’s expensive; it’s harder to come by, and west of the Mississippi, it starts to seem like a really bad idea to use a whole lot of water on lawns,” said Robbins. Elsewhere, inflation and a potential labor shortage may make it less attractive for homeowners and municipalities to pour endless funding into machinery and toxins that obliterate every weed and wildflower.
But at our current political moment, the shift toward more natural landscapes and concern about pollinators may not happen quickly. “The future of the lawn depends on things that have very little to do with individual choice,” Robbins said, citing water availability, real estate markets and the cost of fertilizer and other chemicals. Fevered politics, too, will leave its mark. “I worry that a slow movement towards an agreement that may be a more diverse landscape is possible might bump up against our current political moment,” he said. “And that might be yet another way that lawns hang on for another 40 years.”
