Author Essay

When our house at The Leaf was built in 1824, only Old Country dukes and earls had lawns. Settlers had dooryards planted with peas and cabbages, maybe a swath of greenery beyond the stoop that was scythed now and then or nibbled by the family sheep to keep the wilderness from creeping too close. The scythed area was never very big. What with felling trees and planting crops and managing the livestock, who had the time?
 
When we arrived at The Leaf, the lawn stretched grandly in all directions, covering two acres at least.
 
“The people who lived here must have been in love with their lawn mower,” I said.
 
“Or with Capability Brown,” added my Beloved.
 
Capability Brown was a landscape architect in Britain in the 1700s, a man some call England’s greatest gardener. He was only seventeen when the word lawn was coined for a mowed grassy plot, so I can’t attribute it to him, but he, more than anyone, is responsible for our North American obsession with green-plush yards. It was Brown who gave us a taste for what he called “the pleasing  prospect,” that sweep of undulating grass that leads the eye to a specimen tree, an arrangement of shrubs, a fountain, the front door of a house.
 
A famous portrait of Brown shows him cocking his head at the viewer, a glint in his eye and a barely suppressed grin on his lips, as if he knows the havoc he is about to wreak, as if he can already hear the arguments between countless husbands and wives. More gardens! No – more grass!
 
Still, I find it hard not to like a guy who describes a landscape in terms of grammar.
 
“Now there,” he’d say, pointing a finger, “I make a comma, and there, where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.”
 
I share Brown’s affection for punctuation, but not for the gardenless form of landscape design that is reflected in every contemporary suburban plot. Grass stretches around these houses like a mat around a painting, drawing attention to the prized human construction at the centre. In Brown’s horticultural vision, borders of flowers, trees, and shrubbery served the same function as plaster roses on a fancy picture frame. At The Leaf, the mat inside the frame was enormous: mowing the grass was a ten-hour trial.
 
“It’s too much!” we both exclaimed, exhausted.
 
We stopped mowing the meadow and cut paths through it instead. Every year I dug up sod to plant shrubs and flowers and, yes, ornamental grasses. In the third year, the Garden Guru introduced me to lasagna garden-making – twelve sheets of newspaper, topped with a layer of mulch. The following year – presto– soil, which meant I could eat up the lawn even faster.
 
Within five years, we’d cut the mowing time in half. Then we bought a riding lawn tractor with a wide cutting blade, and “cutting the grass” shrank to an ordeal of little more than three hours. We mow the lawn ten times a year. (I’ve kept track. Wet year, dry year; early spring, late fall: it’s always ten mows.) That means thirty hours on a noisy, spewing machine whose only saving grace is that it blows the clippings into bags so I can use them as mulch.