How the Perfect Lawn Became a Symbol of the American Dream. Perfect lawn

How the Perfect Lawn Became a Symbol of the American Dream

With the rise of suburbia in post-WWII America, the perfect lawn became a potent symbol of the American dream. Whether a sprawling sweep of green mowed in crisp diagonal bands or a more modest swatch of grass and clover, a lawn expressed the national ideal that, with hard work, sacrifice and perhaps a little help from Uncle Sam, home ownership and a patch of land could be within reach for every American.

By contrast, Europe’s historical development of lawns had largely expressed values of elitism and power: Some medieval castle dwellers needed their tall grass hand-cut by scythes in order to see approaching enemies. Landowners with livestock required fields cut down to grazeable heights. And wealthy people with leisure time tamed nature into neatly trimmed surfaces for sporting endeavors like golf, tennis and lawn bowling.

And while early American landowners had appropriated some of those values, by the mid 20th century, the nation had grown its own, less elitist image of the lawn. That evolving history would be shaped by the G.I. Bill, widespread home ownership, egalitarian ideals, technological advancements in mowing, golf courses and the saga of race.

The G.I. Bill and Home Ownership

In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the G.I. Bill, to provide educational and home loan benefits for millions of veterans returning from World War II. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, the program backed 2.4 million low-interest home loans for veterans between 1944 and 1952. As homeownership rates rose from 44 percent in 1940 to almost 62 percent in 1960, owning a home became synonymous with the American dream.

A manicured lawn became a physical manifestation of that dream. “A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling,” explained Abe Levitt, who together with his two sons built Levittowns, housing communities in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania that came to define the cookie-cutter homogeneity of the burgeoning suburbs. “It is the first thing a visitor sees. And first impressions are the lasting ones.”

Frederick Law Olmsted, Father of the American Lawn

Frederick Law Olmsted is best known as the landscape architect of more than two dozen prominent public green spaces—including New York’s Central Park and Chicago’s Washington Park—all known for their rolling meadows. But in 1868, he received a Chicago-area commission to design one of America’s first planned suburban communities. Each house in the Riverside, Illinois development was set 30 feet back from the street. And unlike the homes in England, which were often separated by high walls, Richmond’s yards were open and connected to give the impression of one manicured lawn, evoking the possibility that the lawn was accessible to everyone.

“Even if Olmsted carefully preserved property limits, he seems to have wanted to blur the line between private yards and public spaces,” wrote Georges Teyssot, an architectural historian and author/editor of The American Lawn.

With that blur, wrote New York Times journalist Michael Pollan in 1989, lawns came to unify and define the American landscape: “France has its formal, geometric gardens, England its picturesque parks, and America this unbounded democratic river of manicured lawn along which we array our houses.”

The Rise of Rotary Power Mowers

Olmsted’s idyllic and boundless lawn had to be perfectly manicured. “The lawn is the owner’s principal contribution to the suburban landscape—the piece of the “Park” he keeps up himself,” wrote Robert Fishman, a professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan.

For that job, homeowners needed mowers. In 1830, Englishman Edwin Bear Budding crafted a series of blades around a cylinder to earn the first patent for a mechanical lawn mower. Forty years later, Elwood McGuire, Richmond, Indiana machinist, became the first to design a lightweight push mower. His contraption became the “official mower” of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where men demonstrated its use on a large lawn. According to Mike Emery of Richmond’s daily newspaper, The Palladium-Item, McGuire’s invention helped the Indiana city become the lawn mower capital of the world: “Ten Richmond companies produced two-thirds the world’s reel push mowers, and the city’s innovators and entrepreneurs helped transition to power reel, then power rotary mower.”

In 1935, Leonard Goodall, a Warrensburg, Missouri mechanic, developed a power rotary mower, which made it easier to maintain lawns than the reel-type mowers, which could cut golf greens down to one inch, but had blades that needed constant sharpening. “[Reel mowers] could not cut high grass, which made it difficult for individuals to push them long enough to mow a large yard,” wrote Leonard E. Goodall, the mower pioneer’s son. “The post-World War II suburbanization movement created a great need for a mower that could be used on large lawns.” Goodall’s rotary power mower responded to that need.

The popular power rotary mower drove massive industry growth. According to Virginia Jenkins in The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession, power mower production increased from under 35,000 before World War II to 362,000 in 1947 to nearly 1.2 million in 1951.

As Vivid as Golf Greens

In 1966, when CBS telecast the Masters Golf Tournament in color for the first time, TV viewers could see the perfectly manicured, wall-to-wall vivid green color of the Augusta National Golf Club, whose beautiful Bermuda grass exemplified improvements in turfgrass management. “Virtually everywhere golf courses exhibit magnificent turf, often through 12 months of the year,” Sports Illustrated asserted in 1966, “and having seen what is possible, millions of homeowners feel compelled to go and do likewise.”

For a culture growing obsessed with golf in the 1950s, “the perfect lawn rose to become an icon of the American Dream,” wrote Ted Steinberg, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University and a leading scholar on the American lawn.

WATCH: Full episodes of Assembly Required with Tim Allen and Richard Karn online now.

America’s Dirt Yards

If the beautiful lawn was a shiny emblem of the American Dream, it could also signify the ways in which racism and systemic inequality marked the American landscape. “At a minimum, the fresh new supergreen lawns offered an escape from monochrome life in the cities—a brightly colored consistent landscape that mirrored the aesthetic and racial uniformity of 1950s suburbia,” wrote Steinberg.

In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, historian Richard Rothstein reveals how racist mortgage lenders, real estate agents and discriminatory federal housing policies limited black homeownership—and how white Americans moved to the suburbs because African Americans could not. For many years in Levittown, where perfect lawns proved vital to the planned community’s value system, real estate agents sold houses only to white home buyers.

But this exclusion didn’t mean that African Americans didn’t embrace or understand the significance of the perfect American lawn. John Lewis, the late congressman and civil rights activist, used to tell a story from his youth about playing in a dirt yard at his Aunt Seneva’s shotgun house in rural Alabama. “She didn’t have a green manicured lawn,” he said in a speech. “She had a simple, plain dirt yard. From time to time, she would go out into the woods and take branches from a dogwood tree. And she would make a broom. And she called this broom the brush broom. And she would sweep this dirty yard very clean, sometimes two and three time a week.”

A giant of the civil rights movement, Lewis clearly understood how the juxtaposition of the dirt yard and the “green manicured lawn” provided a jarring image of race in America.

Biodiversity Redefines the Perfect Lawn

In the 21st century, concern has grown over the use of pesticides and water on American lawns—how they waste precious water and poison the underground water table with chemicals.

According to a 2020 CNN report by Matthew Ponsford, residential lawns make up two percent of U.S. land or 49,000 square miles (roughly equal to the size of Greece), but require more irrigation than any agricultural crop grown in the country. There is a growing trend toward turning lawns into gardens that support biodiversity while reducing the use of water and dangerous chemicals. “If attitudes toward lawn care are shifted,” Ponsford wrote, “these grassy green patches represent a gigantic opportunity.”

Farrell Evans is an award-winning journalist who writes about sports and history.

How to Get The Perfect Lawn: Tips to Having The Best Lawn in The Neighborhood

You’ve been staring at your neighbor’s lawn again, haven’t you?

Don’t worry, we’re not judging. But you are, right?

We get it. A little friendly competition in the lawn department is kind of human nature.

Whose lawn is greener? Healthier? Has fewer weeds?

Check out these great tips on how to grow the perfect lawn.

Well, maybe not perfect. But better than your neighbor’s. (Insert sinister laugh here.)

Don’t Skip the Crabgrass Pre-Emergent

You want the best lawn in the neighborhood? Well, timing is crucial. You want to target those weed seeds as they germinate and take root in the soil so they don’t become more seed-producing plants.

A Key to a a Great Lawn: Get Rid of Grubs

If you have grubs, spring is the best time to take action. The key to controlling grubs is to prevent them before they hatch and begin to cause damage to your lawn. You’ll get Bee-Safe Grub Guard right away in the spring during our first visit.

Then, you’re all set. This material lasts throughout the entire growing season.

Mow High

Taller grass helps a lawn grow thicker and stay greener. Mow too short, and the soil heats up, helping pesky weed seeds to germinate. That will not help you grow the perfect lawn.

As summer progresses, you should keep raising your mower blade. Shoot for 3 inches in June, 3.5 to 4 inches in July and August.

How to Make Grass Greener? Go for Granular Fertilizer

Always opt for granular lawn fertilizer, which is more expensive than the more common liquid stuff, but it breaks down slowly, giving you consistent benefits from fertilization.

It also contains organic nutrients, which give your lawn that beautiful, deep green color.You get premium professional-grade formulations of granular fertilizer from RainMaster. Not every lawn fertilizer service offers this.

Don’t Skip Fall Fertilizer

Those turf roots are still hungry. Fertilize in the fall and you give those roots nutrients to grow nice and deep now, with some left over for a healthy start next spring.

Lawn Aeration is Crucial to Getting The Perfect Lawn

When your soil becomes compacted, your lawn can’t breathe. Its roots can’t take in water or nutrients, which weakens your turf and opens the door for disease and weeds.

Lawn aeration uses a machine to pull out plugs of soil, creating spaces so that air and water can penetrate, which leads to healthier roots.Healthier roots make for a healthier, thicker lawn, better able to resist pests and diseases and tolerate summer’s heat and drought.

Lawn aeration also helps break down thatch, that layer of dead grass and stems that sits between the grass blades and the soil.

Aeration is often followed by overseeding, as the holes created by aeration are perfect new homes for the grass seed.

Test Your Lawn Soil pH

No matter how much fertilizer you give your lawn, if your grass doesn’t have the proper, balanced soil pH, it won’t do much good.

Important nutrients for grass are available in soil when the pH is at the right level — not too acidic, not too alkaline.

If your pH is off, your grass won’t get the nutrients it needs, no matter how much you fertilize. That’s not going to get you the best lawn in the neighborhood.

The right pH unlocks your lawn’s ability to take in nutrients and thrive. If your soil’s pH level is out of whack, we can add the right soil amendments to bring it to the right level.

How to Grow a Lawn With Fewer Weeds

If weeds have been driving you crazy, join the club. They’re a huge challenge in your quest to have a better lawn than your neighbors.

But guess what? Unless they’ve turned weed control over to the professionals, weeds are driving them crazy, too.

The DIY weed control products you and your neighbors keep buying just don’t do the job against really tenacious weeds. They never will.

Many weeds need a professional-grade, specialty weed killer multiple times throughout the year to combat them. It’s a continuous process, requiring products only available to professionals.

If you follow all the lawn care tips you read here, your healthy lawn will do its best to keep the weeds at bay. But a key to a great lawn really is professional weed control.

A Key to a Great Lawn: Water Wisely

Wrap up your watering as close to sunrise as possible. If sunrise is at 6 a.m., you should be done watering at 6.Why? A few reasons:

• Wind typically picks up as the day goes on. You don’t want your precious water droplets to blow away.

• The sun will cause your water to evaporate before it can soak into your soil.

• When water droplets land on your grass, they act like tiny magnifying glasses and can cause the sun to burn your grass.

Ditch the Daily Lawn Watering

If you have an established lawn, don’t water it every day.

You want to let the soil dry out between waterings, which means water longer and less frequently.

You want your grass to have to search for water, sending its roots deeper into the soil. That encourages the roots to grow longer and deeper, which means your grass will be healthier.

Water too often, and those roots can just hang out near the surface and get all the water they need. Shallow roots can’t handle the stress of a sudden drought or a summer lawn disease as well as deeper roots.

But this isn’t true for new grass. It should stay wet, so it needs several waterings a day.

How to Get the Perfect Lawn: Invest in a Quality Lawn Care Program

By now you might be thinking this friendly competition stuff is a lot of work.

Why devote your hard-earned weekends to back-breaking lawn care when you could be in a lounge chair surveying your green healthy lawn and gloating?

Looking for lawn care services in Eau Claire, WI or Minneapolis? Let us do the work.

You choose from three different levels of lawn care programs, based on the results you’d like, how fast you want to see results, and your budget.

• Luscious Lawn is a high-end, proactive program that will promote amazing lawn care results. This is the program to choose for the quickest and best results, particularly if your lawn needs a lot of help.

• Terrific Turf, a mid-level option, is our most popular program to grow a thick, green lawn and deal with most challenges.

• Healthy Habitat is a basic plan that includes the elements you need for a better lawn.

Another Key to a Great Lawn? Trust RainMaster in Eau Claire, WI Minneapolis

Weeds are tenacious. Bare patches creep in. Weather can turn against you. Grubs are hungry.

Want to have the best lawn on the block? Request a quote today! We’ll review your lawn care options together so you can make a great choice. Then, you can finally enjoy your lawn and stop worrying about it.

Just Perfect Lawn Care

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This Pro Story

Since 2006, Just Perfect Lawn Care has delighted homeowners across Northeast Ohio, from Cleveland to Akron and the suburbs in between, with custom landscape design, lawn maintenance, winter services, commercial landscaping services, property preservation and much more.

Lawn Yard Services Offered:

How many years have you been in landscaping business, and what inspired you to get started?

We have been in business since 2001 and are driven to provide the best customer service possible.

How does your work stand out from other lawn service companies in the area?

Just Perfect Lawn Care is your premier lawn and landscape company. Our integrity, professionalism and attention to detail have set us apart from the rest. Book our services today!

What advice do you have for a customer looking to hire a provider like you?

It’s best NOT to shop for services just by the price. Look for the company reputation, customer satisfaction and longevity of the company. Experience makes a difference in the services you receive! Just Perfect Lawn Care has been in business since 2001. We are fully insured and know what our customers really want!

What do you like most about the lawn care industry?

The Landscaping industry has enabled us to FOCUS on our number one goal of being committed to our customers needs. Tell us what you want, and we will make every effort to make it happen!

We service all over NE Ohio, including Cleveland, Parma, Strongsville, Middleburg Hts. Brook Park, Berea, North Olmsted, Rocky River, Westlake and Fairview Park.

Perfect Lawn Care

We have the experience and dedication to get the job done right! Specializing in lawn and yard services; We guarantee your satisfaction, and we won’t leave until the job is done right. We pride ourselves on the quality work we provide, while delivering great customer service!

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All statements concerning insurance, licenses, and bonds are informational only, and are self-reported. Since insurance, licenses and bonds can expire and can be cancelled, homeowners should always check such information for themselves. To find more licensing information for your state, visit our Find Licensing Requirements page. Contact pro for more details.

Verified Reviews

Very satisfied and happy with how promptly and thoroughly the job was done! Will definitely recommend

Thank you so much for your review. I rally appreciate it.

Perfect Lawn does my lawn and yard work. They also did some major pruning and tree removal. They also helped repair my drip system.

I could not ask for a better company. They are very dependable and always keep me posted on any things needed or if they are running late for any reason. I have them do my yard all year. Couldn’t ask for a better maintenance crew. Highly recommend them.

Rene is a very hard worker. He takes pride in what he does and is very reasonable. I highly recommend his services.

Great! I’ve been using Perfect Lawn Care for several years and he shows up when he says he’s going to and does a good job.

Rene did a fantastic job! He was always prompt and got the whole yard done very quickly. He’s very dedicated to his craft and always makes sure the quality is top notch. And he does it all for a very reasonable price! Definitely will continue to his their service!

It was an excellent quality of work. He’s very dependable and conscientious of his work. I would use the service again.

He’s the best I ever had in 25 years. He’s top of the line. Details oriented. The quality is a 110% good. He’s dependable, did a good job, and he did what I asked.

They are always friendly, show up on time, and open a can of whoop a on my property. Very reasonable prices, I feel safe and trust them with my property and I would recommend to anyone.

Rene is amazing! I took his suggestion and ordered a full lawn cleanup. His price was already good for what I thought he was going to do, and then he went way beyond expectations. No joke, I’m still amazed a week later when I look at my yard. Worth every penny.

He was extremely professional and very nice. And i would love to have him comeback, I told him to go back in the spring and summer, Because he was very reasonable on the price and the quality of the lawn work was, I would say was outstanding. I would definitely love him to comeback and maintain my lawn for all the season, He is very liable and I think I found the person who can make my lawn and yard look nice.

My lawns were so overdrawn and he took care of the whole sideyard and on the side of the street as well.

Rene has shown me again and again how reliable, hard working and professional he is. I will continue to use him and his services. I would love to see him develop a page on. so that I could recommend him to all my FB friends.

I called and asked for a quote and he was over in about 3 hours from my call. I accepted his quote. He agreed to show up the very next day I was present at the property (which I insisted on being present). He showed up about 5 minutes late. But they worked very hard for several hours doing all that we agreed plus a little more, and all for the price agreed to. The communication and professionalism displayed was top notch. I recommend this company very highly.

Rene was prompt on arrival to start working on my yard. There was much to be done in both front and back, I needed both lawns mowed and edged. which needed much work. Had Rene remove all vegetation from front. In the back yard the ivy from neighboring yard was invading my yard. He cut all to top of my fence. I am very pleased with the work and the clean up. He will now do lawn, edging and weed maintance every two weeks. If you want a hard working young man I recommend calling him, Price is very reasonable.

Newsletter

The deep emerald hue of freshly clipped grass can paint the picture of suburban serenity. In some versions of the American Dream, the perfect lawn represents a keystone of success — often complementing a two-car garage and happy family, or perhaps compensating for the lack of such trappings.

“It’s the status symbol of leisure, that you have time to care for these landscapes,” says Susannah Lerman, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

Lawns are so ubiquitous that Lerman says the U.S. claims an estimated 163,800 square kilometers of lawn space across the country, including parks and golf courses. That’s basically the combined land mass of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. But cultivating your own minuscule patch of turf comes with a number of ecological and environmental consequences. The unsustainable risks range from a depletion of water aquifers to the devastation of local ecosystems. A perfect lawn can also contribute to rising carbon dioxide emissions.

Sucking Out the Life

One of the main problems with lawns is that they often contrast so strongly with native ecosystems, Lerman says.

The popularity of lawns spread with European colonization of the Americas. Even most of the grass species found in U.S. lawns are European. This type of grassy ecosystem might jive alright with the natural ecosystem in some parts of the U.S. — green fields interspaced with glades of trees may not be that out of place in wild areas of New England, for example. But lawns are wildly out of step with the natural ecosystems of dry places like Phoenix or San Diego in the Southwest.

The grasses used in your typical cookie-cutter home don’t thrive naturally in arid areas. If you are in the desert, or even in an area that doesn’t get substantial rain in the summer, you likely need to pump groundwater stored in depleting aquifers to maintain your grass.

“Short, green lawns are embedded in our laws, and those lawns require water in the summer. It may not be as much as agricultural use, but it adds up and depletes urban aquifers,” Randal Barnes, a University of Minnesota professor, writes in this post.

Climate change is leading to increasing droughts in many parts of the world, so sustaining a perfectly green lawn can be a drain on precious resources in some areas.

Lawn Care Sweet Spot

Water usage aside, lawns also create a type of monoculture that represents the opposite of a biodiverse ecosystem. If the only thing you have in your yard is grass, the area is likely not attracting a plethora of different insect species.

This may seem perfectly fine to bug haters, but we’re not just talking about beetles and mosquitos. Pollinators like bees, moths and butterflies are vital for the growth of your flower bed, Apple trees and the farms surrounding your town. Without pollinators there would be no cherry blossoms or berries. Without berries, and the insects that live on the plants, birds would be hard-put to make a living in your neighborhood.

Lerman says that by giving space in your yard to bushes, plants and trees of different sizes, you can diversify the types of ecosystem niches available to the bees and birds. You can even help to diversify your yard by changing the height of the grass itself.

Research Lerman conducted in Massachusetts showed that being a lazy lawnmower actually improves the diversity and abundance of bees. She and her colleagues gave free lawnmowing services to homes in Massachusetts. They cut some lawns on a weekly basis, some every two weeks and others just once every three weeks.

They found that the lawns cut every third week had the larger number of bee species, but not significantly different than those cut every two weeks. The most frequently shaved lawns had the lowest diversity.

For Lerman, this study shows that at least in Massachusetts, the two-week treatment is the sweet spot, if you’re weighing in the cultural expectations of a well-kept yard. Participants that had to wait every three weeks for their lawn-mowing were eager to see the researchers come back compared to the other two treatments. Some from the three-week treatments even said they had to ward off well-meaning neighbors from mowing their lawns for them.

“You can’t just go at [people] from an ecological point of view,” Lerman says. In other words, the best thing ecologically might be wild, waist-high grasses in some areas, but it’s hard to change the predominant belief that well-kempt lawns are equated with house value. And even if one person might be onboard with that, their neighbors likely don’t agree. “Culturally and socially, people weren’t ready,” Lerman adds.

Not all biodiversity sits right with home residents, though. Spiders and other insects play important roles in the ecosystem, but they might creep people out. Ticks are an especially large concern as they can cause disease. On that front, Lerman’s research has shown that frequency of lawn mowing made no detectable difference on tick activity.

Reducing Carbon

Research has also drawn some interesting comparisons between the carbon impact of gas-powered lawnmowers and tree coverage in yards.

Creepy Giant Bunny EXPLAINED �� (decomposing)

Lawnmowers, especially the type you can sit on and operate with a cold drink on a Saturday afternoon, contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, Lerman and colleagues found in one study. But sunny lawns rather than those with trees also take a toll on the climate. Neighborhoods without trees are often hotter on average than shady tree-draped areas. This can have an impact on air-conditioning bills, Lerman says, which drives up carbon consumption.

“The take home message was that more trees —more shade – is really what’s going to help with lowering carbon emission,” Lerman says. “Everyone has this opportunity to contribute to conservation in their back yard.”

How to get the PERFECT LAWN. SIMPLE STEPS to get the LAWN you want

She adds that some municipal and state governments are waking up to this conundrum, creating new rules conserving irrigation or offering subsidized bee-friendly lawns. Las Vegas has recently proposed a ban on grass. according to the Associated Press, while California has enacted various regulations on yard irrigation during droughts.

As far as working with neighbors who may not be so keen on your conservation efforts, Lerman points to the Forest Service’s “Lazy Mower” signs online that you can print and post. “When you think about it, it’s a lot of work to keep these lawns looking nice. Is it worth it?” Lerman asks. “The lazy lawnmower is perfect.”