How the Lawn Mower Massacred the Great American Landscape
Ellis Fertig
As a child, my July nights were defined by the time after dinner when my brothers and I would go venturing out into the dusk to chase down fireflies, the illuminating insects flitting through the skies. During the day, we’d watch bees, beetles, and butterflies bumble flower-to-flower and admire their steady resolve to get the day’s work done. All the while, my parents shook their heads at our lazy neighbor’s yard, wild and overgrown, the chaotic origin of this arthropod ecosystem. The year those neighbors moved was the year that that lawn was cut; the new family massacred years of flowers, grasses, and shrubs, splattering weed-killer and pesticide to eradicate the last fighting remains of something wild. In its place, they left a clean-shaven, uniform and dead green slate. Our bugs were gone; my parents approved.
That blank green slate found in front of American homes has a deep history going back further than most would expect. Lawns like my new neighbors’ originate all the way back to 18th century Europe as a symbol of class. During a time where land was a limited resource necessary for agriculture and livestock production, to not only own land but to waste it on grass became a blatant demonstration of extreme wealth and privilege (Farrell, 2021). Instead of using their land for food, wealthy landowners simply kept grass short and useless. Lawn maintenance before the mower required a skilled laborer’s hand and lots of time, other uncommon privileges for the period (Dusoir, 2024). Among the upper classes, lawn popularity grew, becoming the backbone of games such as croquet and cricket. Inspired by the lawn adorning the Palace of Versailles, American icons such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington hired English landscapers to replicate the plain-grass spaces at their estates Monticello and Mt. Vernon. This European style continued to spread among idolizing Americans (D’Costa, 2024).
However, it was not until the post-WWII era rapid advancement of technology and creation of the suburban American dream that the lawn became an accessible symbol of status for the middle class. The sudden influx of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides allowed one to bend nature to their bidding, and this alongside the new front-yards found in the growing suburbs created a demand for a yard as uniform as the neighborhood. All that was necessary was a mower.
Before the spread of suburbia, the lawn mower as we know it would have been useless. Most lived either in cities, where there were no patches of grass to be owned, or on farms, where grazing animals did a mower’s work. The first mowers used were reel mowers, which were difficult to use and could not even tackle tall grasses. In the early 1930s, Missouri mechanic Leonard Goodall revamped the reel mower after struggling to cut his grass as an amputee, making it easier to maneuver (Farrell, 2021). In 1935, the power rotary mower was born. The new power rotary motor had a gasoline engine, vertical crankshaft, and a blade extending below the frame, greatly reducing the required human effort. While sales started slow, power rotary sales increased from below 35,000 in 1935 to 362,000 by 1947, and up to 1.2 million by 1951 (Wisniewski, 1999). The introduction of the power rotary lawn mower to American suburbs established an expectation that individuals needed to maintain a sterile, clean-cut grass lawn, reinforcing the 1950’s ideals of success while creating a permanent suburban standard detrimental to ecosystems and society at large.
By the 1950s, middle-class families embraced the lawn mower’s gift of social status, creating an expectation of short-cut, monotonous grass. To have a maintained lawn demonstrated professionalism and order. The invasive Kentucky Bluegrass lawn became symbolic of the American dream, as the middle class rose in size and visual status. Lawn Boy mower advertisements displayed the classic white, Americana family, with the providing man pushing the mower for his laid back wife sitting in her yard (Fig. 1) (Lawn Boy, 1958). The depiction of leisure in the backyard demonstrates how lawns reflected economic stability; the well-dressed husband and wife have relaxed weekends to spend together outside. A static, manicured lawn became a sign that homeowners were well-composed, taking pride in the external appearance of their home. Suburban standards, such as playing golf, hosting 4th of July barbecues, and children playing outside, all required someone to mow, weed, seed, and fertilize on a regular basis. The lawn mower became accessible and so therefore so did the status associated with wasted land. By this point, the mere idea of letting land grow naturally was unfathomable.
Fig 1. Lawn Boy advertisement
All of a sudden, the unnatural lawn was an expectation beyond a design statement. Weeds must be massacred, leaves bagged and removed, and to have grass with a demonstrated ability of growing was something to be ashamed of. The lawn industry boomed, with lawn grass becoming the US’s largest irrigated crop, six times as common as corn in second place (D’Costa, 2024). Not only were these social expectations dominant, they were immortalized in law, removing any choice for homeowners to allow land to grow naturally. In 1988, Virginia passed a law allowing homeowners to be fined up to $100 for allowing grass to grow above eight inches. Similar fines can still be found written into Alabama and Indianapolis legislatures, with the most extreme case being California’s fines of up to $1,000 for grass or weeds above 12 inches (Fines for Not Cutting Your Grass, 2024). While lawns became a defining symbol for the land of the free, Americans living the dream lost freedom over their land.
By the turn of the 20th century, there was no going back to original American ecosystems. Due to these societal expectations and associated laws, lawns replaced prairies and forests as the new great American landscape. By 2005, lawns made up 2% of all United States land, about the same amount of space as the entirety of Texas (D’Costa, 2024). Ecologically, that’s a lot of wasted land. Removing leaves destroys habitat for all kinds of bugs, such as moths, crickets, frogs, beetles, and my childhood fireflies (Johnson, 2002). Those ever-spinning mower blades we push like Sisyphus shred apart moth wings and caterpillar cocoons, leaving ribbons of carnage within the pristine and sparkling green grass. Those that avoid the mower’s wrath are not saved, as the lawn mower makes no exception for nectared flowers and leaves only a tiny strip of over-fertilized garden for our beloved pollinators to fight over. What was once biodiverse prairie and meadow, full of flowers and springtime, became micromanaged monotony, devoid of real life.
For those lacking empathy for the critters and crawlers who live among us, it’s worth remembering that the monoculture lawn is also harmful to the people who own it. In the East, invasive Kentucky Bluegrass lacks the root structure to hold onto the increasing rains, leaving rivers of water flowing across yards, into streets, and into houses (D’Costa, 2024). On the other coast, lawns in California use 9% of the state’s water, stealing from a dwindling supply (Hodel, 2015). That’s not to mention the health impacts of fertilizer runoff and pesticide exposure. Glyphosate, the most highly used herbicide in the world and the base behind popular garden herbicides such as Roundup, is an endocrine disruptor, a neurotoxin, trigger for celiac, and the list of other exposure-induced side effects goes on (Khaira, 2023). This is bad for us and worse for wildlife. Even if our modern idea of the lawn feels “neat,” is it worth the trouble?
Since the popularization of the mower, Americans have been trapped by the expectation to kill everything that decides to make a home of our land. Whether I can extrapolate our lawn obsession into some metaphor for American imperialism and our colonist ideals of domination over what is native to a land, or if it is truly just a misguided aesthetic choice, there is no denial that this has gone too far. While lawns began as a status symbol only for the uber wealthy, the mower expanded the potential of owning plain green slabs of land to the common man, and suburbia became blinded by admiration for this upgraded status. Popularization of suburban lawns encouraged mass ecological damage, becoming so intertwined with the other habitual home responsibilities that one no longer even has the option to reject the burden of maintaining their lifeless strip of land. Is it out of the question to let native grasses grow tall or to simply use the front yard for the vegetable garden? We are stuck mowing lawns never used, raking leaves from backyards never looked at, and dumping toxic chemicals over the same grasses our children play on. Our fixation on manicured lawns has turned into a quiet tyranny, prioritizing conformity over sustainability, and leaving us disconnected from the potential of the land we inhabit.
Ellis Fertig is a current freshman from northern New Jersey studying computer science. Her hobbies include hiking, reading, and fiber arts. In the future, she hopes to apply her computer science degree to advance environmental restoration efforts.
