Lawns in the U.S. cover an area roughly the size of New York State; each year, forty billion dollars is spent on their upkeep. Illustration by Robert Risko

In 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing published the first landscape-gardening book aimed at an American audience. At the time, Downing was twenty-five years old and living in Newburgh, New York. He owned a nursery, which he had inherited from his father, and for several years had been publishing loftily titled articles, such as “Remarks on the Duration of the Improved Varieties of New York Fruit Trees,” in horticultural magazines. Downing was dismayed by what he saw as the general slovenliness of rural America, where pigs and poultry were allowed to roam free, “bare and bald” houses were thrown up, and trees were planted haphazardly, if at all. (The first practice, he complained, contributed to the generally “brutal aspect of the streets.”) His “Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening” urged readers to improve themselves by improving their front yards. “In the landscape garden we appeal to that sense of the Beautiful and the Perfect, which is one of the highest attributes of our nature,” it declared.

Downing’s practical ideas about how to achieve the Beautiful included grouping trees in clusters, importing shrubbery of “the finest foreign sorts,” and mixing forms and colors with enough variety to “keep alive the interest of a spectator, and awaken further curiosity.” Essential to any Perfect garden, he held, was an expanse of “grass mown into a softness like velvet.” As an example of what he had in mind, Downing pointed to the Livingston estate, near Hudson, New York. (Privately, in a letter to a friend, he noted that maintaining the grounds of the Livingston estate required the labors of ten men.) “No expenditure in ornamental gardening is, to our mind, productive of so much beauty as that incurred in producing a well kept lawn,” he wrote.

By almost any measure, the “Treatise” was a success. It went through eight editions and sixteen printings, and it made Downing famous. One critic called him the “Sir Joshua Reynolds of our rural decorations.” The “Treatise,” another proclaimed, had ushered in a “new epoch in the annals both of our literature and our social history.” In 1851, Downing was invited by President Millard Fillmore to design improvements to the grounds around the Capitol. Before the project could be completed, however, Downing died in a steamboat accident on the Hudson; he was just thirty-six.

Downing’s practice was taken over by his protégé, Calvert Vaux, whom he had brought over from London as an assistant. (Vaux named his first son Downing.) Later, Vaux joined up with Frederick Law Olmsted, whose career Downing had also encouraged. The two men embraced many of Downing’s ideas. They designed Central Park, with its broad lawns, and laid out suburbs like Riverside, Illinois, and Sudbrook Park, Maryland, with their many lesser lawns. Olmsted and Vaux’s work, in turn, influenced countless suburban subdivisions. The design for Levittown little resembled the Livingston estate, except for the grassy plot surrounding every Cape Cod. “No single feature of a suburban residential community contributes as much to the charm and beauty of the individual home and the locality as well-kept lawns,” Abraham Levitt once observed.

Having migrated into many parts of the United States that did not yet belong to the United States when the “Treatise” was published, the lawn today is nearly ubiquitous. Its spread has given rise to an entire industry, or, really, complex of industries—Americans spend an estimated forty billion dollars each year on grass—and to the academic discipline of turf management, degrees in which can now be obtained from, among other schools, the University of Massachusetts and Ohio State. The lawn has become so much a part of the suburban landscape that it is difficult to see it as something that had to be invented.

This triumph has also brought into being a new tradition in landscape writing. The anti-lawn treatise attacks both the idea of the velvety expanse—David Quammen has observed, only half jokingly, that though Communism has fallen, “lawnism” continues—and the real labor that goes into pursuing it. The writer in this tradition toils in the hope (probably vain) of reversing more than a hundred and fifty years of gardening history. He envisions an American landscape that looks more like it did in Downing’s day—one covered in moss, or scrub, or, alternatively, just weeds.

Among the dozen or so main grasses that make up the American lawn, almost none are native to America. Kentucky bluegrass comes from Europe and northern Asia, Bermuda grass from Africa, and Zoysia grass from East Asia. These and other so-called turfgrasses are botanically ambidextrous; they can reproduce sexually, by putting out seeds, and asexually, by spreading laterally. (Biologists believe that they acquired this second ability some twenty million years ago, during the Miocene, when large herbivores, including the ancestors of the modern horse, switched from eating leaves to munching grass.)

Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated. In his anti-lawn essay “Why Mow?,” Michael Pollan puts it this way: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”

In the early days of lawns—British aristocrats started planting them sometime around the start of the eighteenth century—there were two ways to mow. A landowner could use grazing animals, like sheep, which meant also employing sheepkeepers, or he could send out bands of scythe-wielding servants. Then, in 1830, Edwin Beard Budding, an engineer from Gloucestershire, came up with a third alternative—“a machine for mowing lawns, etc.” (Supposedly, Budding was inspired by the rotating blades then used to trim the nap on carpets.) Budding’s invention made the task of cutting grass faster and cheaper and, at least for the maker of the new mowers, profitable. Further mechanical improvements followed. In 1870, an American inventor named Elwood McGuire designed a lightweight mower with an innovative wheel design. By 1885, U.S. manufacturers were pumping out machines at the rate of fifty thousand a year. In 1893, the first steam-powered mower was patented, and a few decades later the gasoline-powered mower hit the market. An advertisement for an Ideal Junior Power Mower, from 1922, celebrated the exceptional efficiency of the new technology. It asserted that many property owners, “who previously had to hire two or three men to keep their grass cut, now do the work with one of these.”

A lawn may be pleasing to look at, or provide the children with a place to play, or offer the dog room to relieve himself, but it has no productive value. The only work it does is cultural. In Downing’s day, the servant-mowed lawn stood, eloquently, for the power structure that made it possible: who but the very rich could afford such a pointless luxury? As mechanical mowers enabled middle-class suburbanites to cut their own grass, this meaning was lost and a different one took hold. A lawn came to signal its owner’s commitment to a communitarian project: the upkeep of the greensward that linked one yard to the next.

“A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors, as desirable citizens,” Abraham Levitt wrote. (By covenant, the original Levittowners agreed to mow their lawns once a week between April 15th and November 15th.) “The appearance of a lawn bespeaks the personal values of the resident,” a group called the Lawn Institute declared. “Some feel that a person who keeps the lawn perfectly clipped is a person who can be trusted.”