The Perfect Lawn

There's nothing like waking up to the roar of a Shindaiwa EB250 leaf blower pumping lawn detritus through your bedroom window at 166 mph. Every Monday it's my urban reveille, followed by a tear-jerking plume of fuel exhaust from a Pony Tiller.

The Los Angeles slang for this morning routine is "mow, blow and go," a phrase that could imply activities of ill repute. Instead, it's horticultural shorthand for that wham-bam style of gardening where a quick reshuffling of leaves and some radical turf scalping constitute property maintenance.

In the same spirit, the best of our trees have all, at one time or another, been flush cut, crowned and tipped down to their stubs, usually in mere minutes. Witnessing the latest of these operations, I asked a neighbor why he was uprooting yet another tree. His response: "I'm getting tired of pruning it. It's shedding on my lawn."

So, down it came. Along with it came the protective habitat for our resident mockingbird and the canopy of shade it offered the neighbors. In a twisted case of universal comeuppance, patches of pythium blight developed where the tree used to be, most likely as a result of the intense and direct sun now searing the unprotected grass — lawn burn, if you will.

To heal those unsightly patches, he'll need a cocktail of fungicide and fertilizer, combined with increased thatch reduction and a systematic restructuring of his automatic sprinkling system so as to prevent grease-spot saturation. Estimated human hours: ten times what it would have been to rake a few leaves.

Were the leaves the lawn owner's greatest dilemma? Here we venture into the dubious territory of ascribed motives. It's possible that he secretly harbored a desire for the green god, the tapis vert of Versailles or of Monticello. No rational thought process could have led to the meticulous over-pruning and tending of this greenery. It's simply not sane to chainsaw a self-reliant tree with no apparent maintenance burden and replace it with a buzz cut that seems to serve no ecological purpose except as a dog-waste repository.

There's a distinction between "lawn" — the chemically-addicted form — and the natural grasses that nurture ladybugs, pollinators and — sadly, for the lawn perfectionist — a host of other pesky wild things striving to live free and prosper.

The lawn urge can overtake the most sensible of homeowners, who previously pledged allegiance to low-maintenance, drought-resistant native habitat, but who, in the interest of extending the comfort of their wall-to-wall Berber outdoors, succumbed to the lawn imperative. On one hand, there's something to be said for the bourgeois aesthetic of a prim sheath of green beneath one's feet, particularly in the summer when swelter and sweat beg for something cushy between the toes.

But there's also the issue of lawn as urban separator — a divider, not a uniter — where obfuscating our link with natural resources seems the primary role of the turf. One local homeowner not only planted lawn, but obsessively watered it so as to deter the rattlesnakes she knew would infest her property, should a cactus or two find its way into the floral mix. "They'll come for water, so if I keep watering at the edges, they will stay at the perimeter."

Yes, it's a dicey task to extrapolate from that one story, to the whole of the lawn-owning public. Perhaps she was certifiably mad, in which case she represents nothing more than a colorful portrayal of an American lawner. Still, the amount of deterrent and poison needed to keep a lawn in its most virgin state, is anathema to anything that could be deemed natural or wild. It's as if once you plant a lawn, you've condemned yourself to a cycle of labor which renders the leisure aspect of lazy turf almost moot... unless, of course, you have your "mow, blow and go" guys. That may account for the Monday-through-Wednesday rancor we hear on our street as lawn after lawn submits to the wishes of the Pony Tiller.

Rudimentary calculations reveal that the lawn-to-other-vegetation ratio is increasing in our neighborhood, which seems to comply with national estimates that lawn represents about 30 million acres of our lithosphere... 30 million and growing. That's practically a biome in itself. When you consider that 78 million acres of rainforest are leveled every year, it's possible "lawn" will actually bypass rainforest in terms of planetary biomass, which means the rules of taxonomy will have to be rewritten to exclude those species no longer viable in the face of "lawn."

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad development when you consider how burdensome it might be to scientifically classify the biodiversity, particularly the kind that sheds leaves on your lawn. Of course, whether or not taxonomy can be fluid or changing is an ever-evolving controversy, but if a roll of Kentucky Bluegrass can bring some resolution to this scientific dilemma, who are we to quibble.

The promise of one huge, homogeneous blanket of mono crop bodes well for lawn mower racing competitions and robotic mowers that will have a much easier time of it, not having to circumvent shrubs and tree trunks (remaining stumps, notwithstanding).

Of course, you have to consider the costs of maintaining lawn in lieu of native habitat. Aside from the aforementioned fertilizer and chemical compounds, the real costs begin to mount in biological terms when, 1) a lawnmower produces 10 or so times the pollution of your average car, and 2) the estrogenic effects of some commonly used pesticides turn your previously taut pecs into 38 double-Ds. The urban effluent careening downstream toward frogville has thus far produced just a few hermaphroditic frogs and maybe an effeminate salamander or two. But it's a point worth pondering the next time you get tired of raking leaves.

— Ingrid Taylar (taylar@mac.com)

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)