The Roar of the Dandelion/The Smell of My Overgrown Lawn

The Roar of the Dandelion / The Smell of My Overgrown Lawn

By David Ballard

I share a driveway with a couple of neighbors. It is a dusty lime-rock road that meanders lazily through a stand of woods and leads to a 15 acre tract of country land on which the three of us have built our homes. "It bothers me to see these sticks on the ground!" says one of my neighbors after stopping his fancy riding mower with its attached over-piled garden cart to chat and seemingly chastise. He had obviously just picked up all of the fallen small branches on either side of the entry lane and was hauling them off to his burn pile to join the heaping collection of other sticks he has collected from elsewhere on the property. "It's pretty common for sticks to fall on the ground in the woods," I replied. "Well, it bothers me every time I drive by one and see it there," he asserted. "Doesn't bother me at all," I countered, ignoring his implication that I should perhaps assist him with his obsession. "But," I continued, "Wouldn't it be better for the environment if you just tossed those sticks into the woods rather than burning them?" My neighbor just stared at me blankly, completely unable to comprehend such an alien way of thinking. "You can't just throw sticks into the woods," he insisted and to stymie my ready reply that sticks naturally return to soil in the woods all the time, he immediately blathered, "When you gonna mow your lawn? Its two feet tall!" I turned to look at my "lawn" and saw a combination of seeding grass stalks, clovers, clumps of spiderwort with clusters of small blue flowers, numerous wild gladiola plants (that were two feet tall), irises, amaryllis, hanging wisteria and a myriad assortment of small and colorful wild flowers, some of which I don't even know the name of but particularly enjoy. "I love my flower garden," I retorted, "especially the dandelions. Don't you?" My neighbor's mower roared and reared; the pile of sticks sprung high into the air above the garden cart and fell back down again, whaaappp! Lurching forward, my lawn Scrooge rumbled mercifully away leaving me to choke on my laughter in the gathering clouds of our drought's proverbial dust. I observed that he immediately steamed over to commiserate with our third neighbor, who like himself, also grew up in the 1950s in suburbia, imprinted with the need for the uniformity of close-cropped manicured lawns as they were then becoming a national obsession. "I am fortunate," I once told them both when being scolded and ganged up on that "I moved to the country to be far away from neighborhood societies and busybodies who assume any right to enforce their highly prejudiced lawn bigotry upon me." My neighbors determined and have steadfastly maintained that I must simply be too lazy (or worse) to care for my lawn as it is seemingly incomprehensible to them that I actually prefer a yard "overgrown" with a plethora of wild, colorful and aromatic "weeds" over a homogenous sea of unscented monochromatic green. I think I overheard them say it was un-American. Unfortunately, that does seem to be the current, concerted majority opinion.

In the not too distant past, sweeping green lawns were the sole province of high society. Being labor intensive, only the very wealthy could afford a staff of gardeners to maintain these monoliths. It was an in your face show of wealth and position. Then, in the post- World War 2 era, power mowers became affordable for most households. "Just add water", in copious amounts, was made feasible by hoses and sprinklers and municipal water supplies. Chemical companies eager for a post-war market for their war-time products churned out synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The social-climbing, status- building competitions for the grandest, greenest swaths of perfect outdoor carpeting were on. The U.S. Golf Association and Garden Club of America had combined to create a standard for lawns that was "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged." The garden club even held contests for best lawns and campaigned that it was one's "civic duty" to have one. My neighbors and my neighbors' parents were obviously convinced. And so were my parents and millions of other Americans who have righteously passed this predisposition on to their progeny and condemned and legislated against those who would dare to let their hair ...um...grass grow longer. In my opinion, lawn work is over-rated.

Today, Americans spend billions of dollars annually on lawn care. We dump tons of synthetic fertilizers and poisonous pesticides into our environment to maintain them. Fifty to seventy percent of residential water use is for landscaping, most of it to water the grass even in times of drought and growing water shortages. Pollution from a cacophony of smoke belching power mowers is a significant contributor to global warming.

As we have watched the myths that were created and accepted in society about the strength and fairness of our financial system unravel in scandal, so might we also question many other myths that have been foisted on us as fact by our corporate society. Perhaps we need question our learned perception of the benefits of the perfect lawn. As many of us tighten our belts and do with less in these times of a weak economy, perhaps we might also consider in these times of an uncertain environment; cutting, fertilizing and watering our grass less often, thus saving money, being kinder to our planet and instead of the roar of the mower learning to enjoy the roar of the dandelion.

Photo of "overgrown lawn" © David Ballard