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It's not that other countries don't have lawns, or that Australians only seed their gardens with spider eggs or something. But with few exceptions, it's only Americans that surround their homes with lawn-oceans so big that they need to own a special type of car with razor blades attached to it just to keep the stuff trimmed. Where I come from, you own a riding mower if you just inherited a soccer field and don't know what to do with it yet. Here, keeping a razor-car around is completely normal, and so is spending half your weekend driving one.

And in America, lawns are hardly ever surrounded by fences or hedges or a barbed-wire demilitarized zone, like they would be in normal countries. Instead, you and your neighbor's lawns must fade into each other like the memories of the shots of cheap whiskey you drank last night. Then your good American neighbor will inevitably mow his lawn right up to the edge of your property, leaving your property's much longer grass sitting there like a topographic map of your own failure.

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Why Is It Like That?

Lawns were first brought to America in the 19th century, but it was a bunch of turf-crazy suburban planners that really caused this country to embrace them. These planners began urging people to build gardens with lawns that touched their neighbors: unlike the British upper-classes, who surrounded their gardens with "inhospitable brick walls" to keep out their poverty-stricken neighbors, Americans were told to combine their front yards as a sign of New World egalitarianism. Perhaps because talk radio hadn't been invented yet, this strangely communistic idea took off, and Americans have been mingling their outdoor carpet-gardens ever since.