The Case Against Lawns
I’ve long disliked the boringness and the tedium of lawns. This is a great article about it, written by the author of McMansion Hell which has a series of amusing posts about terribly designed “mansions”.
The lawn is, and has always been, a status symbol. Lawns have their roots in the English estates of the 16th century, where wealthy landowners planted turf grass for their cattle to graze on, and on which lawn sports could be played. These lawns, and later iterations such as the mathematically tidy gardens of Versailles and other elite estates, required meticulous hand-scything by hired servants to keep the turf grass at a handsome and desirable length. The few who could afford such a massive deployment of labor took pride in their lawns, which were, until the 19th century, only affordable to them.