We love a freshly manicured lawn. Why is that? Blame it on the Garden Club or America, founded in 1913. Green lawns and landscaped front yards were not high on our list of priorities until contests held by the club and their publicity campaigns inspired in property owners the notion that a beautifully maintained lawn was a civic duty, no less.

Indeed, the Garden Club took their message a step further by stating that an appropriate lawn consisted in “a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mowed at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged.” Residential lawn care was born, as were weekend afternoons when, instead of hired gardeners, family men mowed in unison while children played and women hung the laundered clothes in the wind.

Early Group Project - Garden Club of America

Generation after generation, we adopt and repeat practices and activities with little thought to the history behind each gesture and to the fact that, at any given time, the same activities are repeated in every town of every state or province in the nation. A short film by the National Film Board of Canada illustrates this rather well as it explores the games children played in their respective communities in the 1960′s. Children from distant towns who had never met or even heard of each other’s existence shared exactly the same customs, played the same games and sang the same songs; mothers hung the clothes on the line and lawns were cared for in exactly the same manner.

Many of our European forefathers had known relative ease. Some had experienced the life of the wealthy, strolling through sweeping green lawns on the family estate. We tend to reproduce what we know and some travelers to the new world brought along their perception of the proper appearance of one’s homestead. Images of the manicured lawn were firmly impressed upon the imagination. Native grasses proved to be somewhat of a challenge, however, and English grass seed did not fare well in our climate.

The impeccably weed-free and perfectly green lawns we value, expect and almost take for granted today did not exist as a wide-spread idea in America until the late 1800′s. If there was thresh on the floors inside, it is also true that the front yard, just outside the door, consisted in packed dirt, random, free growing plants and the occasional vegetable and root garden. Those were practical times.

The search for aesthetics was to come later. Perhaps it emerged as a direct by-product of a sentiment of increasing security or stability. Meanwhile, every aspect of lawn care required extensive hands-on work and the assistance of animals. Presidents Washington and Jefferson, like many ordinary citizens, employed sheep to maintain their lawns.

In 1830, Edwin Budding, an Englishman and engineer at a textile mill, developed a cylinder mower. Push mowing makes its first appearance on the residential scene in 1870 thanks to the invention and distribution of a machine attributed to Elwood McGuire of Richmond, of Indiana. By 1885, America was producing 50,000 lawnmowers a year. These were shipped to every country on the planet.

An activity of leisure further contributed to a shift in our relationship with grass, open areas and residential grounds. By 1915, the U.S. Golf Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture collaboratively researched and developed grasses that would sustain the variety of climates present in America. By 1930, research began to address other minute details such as pests, weeds and soil nourishment. Pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers entered the scene.

Today, we shop for lawn care tools and equipment like we shop for groceries. Every imaginable product and machine is lined up on shelves, each with its own list of ingredients and unique features. Our relationship with our lawn tools is a topic worthy of a study of its own. We are far, far away from the few trusted tools of the hired gardener of old who, with a pair of trusted, patched up and pampered hedge shears transformed edges and rose bushes into works of art.

The gardener of old did not have the luxury of choice we have today, but he (or she) certainly experienced the same awesome feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment that is the gift  of every day spent shaping the wild surroundings of one’s home.