A Note from a Lawn Care Serf
A brief account of my search to find who to blame for my lost weekends.
The birth of the machine
This morning, I’m surrounded by swarms of lawnmowers. Each machine is scolding me because I’m listening, not mowing. Since I am choosing comfort over sweat and gasoline fumes, I decided to search the Internet to find the name of that vile person who invented lawns. My thread started when I found the person that invented the lawn mower. Edwin Beard Budding is the lowlife inventor!
Budding (catchy name) is the culprit responsible for millions of hours of lost sleep from eager neighbors’ mowing addictions. This fiend’s vile invention squirmed into life 1830.
The time-thief found
With my first victory, I hunched over my 13" MacBook Pro and redoubled my investigation. I found that, as despicable as Budding’s invention is, the biggest scoundrel in this leisure-stealing caper is Frederick Law Olmsted.
It’s the modus operandi of Mr. Olmsted, alias the “father of American landscape design,” that has, for more than a century, stolen weekends from hardworking people, everywhere. Ah, I’m sure his day will come! Well, his day has come; he passed away in 1903.
The tactical, military use of lawns
As I continued to ferret out lawns and lawn care history, I hit the motherlode of all things historical about lawns. An article titled “WHY WE HAVE GRASS LAWNS” contains copious content about the when, where, and why America became the land of lawns and lawnmowers.
From my survey of the history of lawns, I learned that the genesis of lawns comes from English and French castles. It should come as no surprise that an enterprise so malevolent as lawn care was birthed by the military-industrial complex! No activity so insidious could have otherwise been conceived.
It is believed that the word “lawn” comes from “launde”, a Middle English word meaning “opening in the woods.” The proprietors of castles decided it would be a good military tactic to carve out open land around their castles to provide killing fields. They found it handy to get their enemies out in the open instead of allowing them to hide behind trees.
If I’d been a king during medieval times, I would have chosen to leave the opening in the woods, well, open, muddy. Like the adage says, “You can catch more enemies with mud than with lawn.” But no, some nitwit chose pretty over practical.
Why we have grass lawns
Now my search led me to grass; no, not that kind! Referring to the “WHY WE HAVE GRASS LAWNS” tome, I once again found French fingerprints all over the green carpet. Quoting from this tome:
“Grass,” specifically, is a term for the plant family Gramineae, which encompasses over 9000 different species of plants. By the late 17th century, grass lawns, with the grass cut close to the ground, started popping up on the grounds of the wealthy, such as at the famed Versailles gardens in France where “green carpet” (tapis vert) was included in André Le Nôtre’s landscape design.
Paradise Lost
So now we know. The bane of our weekend lives comes from medieval, high-class aristocrats buttressed by the military-industrial complex of their day. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to collar one of those aristocrats to mow my lawn, but they are rarely seen these days. How I rue the day that Edwin Budding exuded his maniacal machine!
