Why Americans are painting their gardens green

To paint or not to paint?

That’s the question many homeowners face when their dreams of a perfect lawn are dashed, either by inflation, which puts more expensive lawn care options out of reach, or by drought, which causes lack of water.

More and more are changing the seed spreader for the paint can and opting, according to a report by The Wall Street Journalfor shades of green with names like “Fairway” and “Perennial Rye.”

Where does this desire to turn the exterior of the house into a green carpet of decoration come from?

A few years ago I decided to investigate it and the result was my book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn.

What I discovered was that lawn care goes way back in American history. Former Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had lawns, but they weren’t perfect lawns. The perfect lawn ideal – a supergreen, weed-free monoculture – is a recent phenomenon.

Levittown’s not-so-perfect lawn

Its beginnings can be traced largely to the post-World War II era, when suburban developments like New York’s iconic Levittown sprang up.

Levittown was the brainchild of the Levitt family, who viewed landscaping as a form of “neighborhood stabilization,” or a way to bolster property values. The Levitts, who built 17,000 homes between 1947 and 1951, insisted that homeowners mow their lawns once a week between April and November, and included it in the covenants that accompanied the deeds.

But the Levitts took the lawn obsession only so far. “I don’t believe in being a slave to the lawn,” wrote Abraham Levitt. To him, the clover was “as nice” as the grass.

engineering perfection

All of this is to say that the search for the perfect lawn did not come naturally. It had to be engineered, and one of the most influential companies in this regard was Scotts Co. of Marysville, Ohio, which used agricultural chemicals and created products that homeowners could spread around their gardens.

Formulators like Scotts had one big advantage: Grass is not native to North America, and growing it on the mainland is, for the most part, an uphill ecological battle. So the owners needed a lot of help in the pursuit of perfection.

But first Scotts had to make the idea of ​​the perfect turf embed itself in the American imagination. Scotts knew how to take advantage of postwar trends in brightly colored consumer products. From yellow pants to blue jelly, colored products became status symbols and a sign that the consumer had rejected the drab black-and-white world of urban life for the modern suburb and its kaleidoscopic colors, which included , of course, the vibrant green of the lawn.

Architectural trends also helped entrenched the aesthetic of the perfect lawn. The blurring of indoor and outdoor space occurred in the post-war period, when patios and, over time, sliding glass doors invited homeowners to treat the garden as an extension of the living room. What better way to achieve a comfortable outdoor space than to cover the garden with a beautiful green area.

In 1948, the perfect lawn took a giant step forward when Scotts Co. began selling its “Weed and Feed” lawn care product, which allowed homeowners to simultaneously weed and fertilize.

This product was probably one of the worst things to happen, ecologically speaking, to the American garden. Now, homeowners spread the toxic herbicide 2,4-D—which has since been linked to cancer, reproductive harm, and neurological impairment—on their lawns as a matter of course, whether they had weed problems or not.

Selective herbicides such as 2,4-D killed broadleaf “weeds” like clover while leaving the grass intact. Clover and bluegrass, a desirable grass species, evolved together as the former captured nitrogen from the air and added it to the soil as fertilizer. By removing it, homeowners had to go back to the store for more artificial fertilizer to make up the shortfall.

It was bad news for homeowners, but a good business model for companies that sold lawn care products that both hurt homeowners by killing the clover and sold them more chemical inputs to recreate. what could have happened naturally.

The “perfect” grass had come of age.

The meaning of painting the lawn

By the early 1960s, homeowners were already looking for ways to get a perfect lawn cheaply.

An article published in 1964 in Newsweek noted that green lawn paint was sold in 35 states. The magazine opined that since a homeowner “needs a chemistry degree to understand the bewildering array of brushcutters and buggers now on the market”, paint was becoming an attractive alternative.

So the interest in painting the lawn is not entirely new.

The novelty, however, is that the recent phenomenon occurs in a context in which a more plural vision of the garden has taken root.

Fed up with corporate-dominated lawn care, people are turning back time and cultivating their yards with clover, a drought-resistant plant that also provides nutrients. And so the clover lawn has made a comeback, with videos on TikTok tagged #cloverlawn garnering 78 million views.

The return of grass painting and a revival of interest in clover suggest that the perfect, resource-intensive lawn is an ecological presumption the country may no longer be able to afford.

Ted Steinberg, Professor of History, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.