some old thoughts on the front lawn (changing the way we look at suburbia is imperative)

the new issue of landscape architecture [9/2006 vol 96 no 9] has an interesting and incredibly biased article on two communitites with prolific stormwater management systems. linda mcintyre's piece is called "parting of the waters" and addresses the first project in great detail. the one, at pennswood village in bucks county, pa, is populated with happy-go-environmental quakers who whole heartedly suppport the project. the stormwater management system used at Neshaminy Creek tries to mimic a natural riparian system, with crisscrossing swales and multiple bioretention basins to slow and hold water over the duration of a storm. the sedimentation basins aren't bad looking, even reminiscent of shop creek, and there is a meadow nearby also. this project is a slam-dunk, a no-brainer and only someone trying to make a cheap buck would screw it up.

the second project, sweetwater farm, only ten minutes drive from pennswood, is another story altogether. let me quote," ...sweetwater farm [is] a subdivision of neat houses in feasterville, pa, with verdant manicured lawns and island beds planted with colorful flowers and ornamental trees such as weeping cherries and bradford pears." this sentence is so laden with the latent bitterness of a profession that lost the attention of the homeowner long ago. sorry, garrett, your axons failed us. both the author and the magazine's editor attack the residents of sweetwater for being "generic suburbanites who view chimical lawn treatments as the holy grail of landscape care" (11). like spoiled children.

michael pollan explains in his book, second nature, that the suburban front (and back?) lawn isn't a place for individuality, expression or creativeness. it is a place for conformity, where each lawn meticulously blends into its neighbor, where the conformed ideals of each family are played out in the public world. in fact, this idea, the lawn, grew out of the work of olmsted, vaux, downing and frank j. scott, whose the art of beautifying suburban home grounds  encapsulted the rules of the lawn (pollan 70). scott saw the lawn as the levening ground in which society could play out its conventions in an orderly and fair way, as well as displaying our good-neighborly and well-to-do -ness (p 72).

lawn treatments and matching swing sets on a bed of bermuda grass are symptoms of conceived wealth. if each homeowner can display their new car, let their twelve children run amok in relative saftey and show off their perfect rose bushes in the midst of the contunuous suburban lawn, that same leveling ground of scott's becomes the backdrop to if you could take the status out of open land, well, the real estate market might plummet, but the need to show off fertilizer-rich, pest-free, untilled, for-viewing-only land would lose its cache.

at sweetwater farm, this need for congruity rears its ugly head. it is amusing that the reason the homeowners embarked on this journey to meadow-ville was to control their canadian geese epidemic. canadian geese are attracted to manicured front lawns like new yorkers to a sale at barneys. there's no question they'll be there. so as the homeowners stared out their windows at the offenders, the township started working on the problem. their solution, with the help of nancy minich and the pa. dept of environmental protection coastal zone management, created a decent solution to the geese problem while also addressing non-point source runoff at the same time with native planting. [yay! +1 for the good guys] unfortunately, "native planting" means weeds to most suburbanites who have never lived somewhere unmowed. i can hear them from here: "unmowed! what will happen next, people will walk to the grocery store?!?!?!"

people need to change their attitudes about their front lawns. it's not going to be about getting rid of the canadian geese [ which , by the way, i personally believe is the avian answer to the cockroach and will probably last as long]. it's not even going to be about polluted headwaters or water deficiencies. we need to design yards in a way that people can still have the space to play catch with their footballs, stare at their wretched bradford pears, and mow mow mow till the cows come home. its about incremental steps that are barely intrusions. processes that complement the yard, filtering slowly into the suburban consciousness as the best new way to control those geese, could also control stormwater to water the grass the next day. or collecting pollutants in the driveway and running them to one of those island beds with pollutant eating grasses that looks like a nice eding to the driveway. it's about showing people what they want to see and giving them what they need at the same time.

if people are given better options that are not going to cause a significant change to their lives, but that will better serve their needs [to be better about themselves or the environment or both] then change will happen. maybe next time someone plans a sweetwater farm community, they start with those systems in place and people take them as a given. its going to take a change first in our design thinking, not the suburbanites, for real change to occur in suburban neighborhoods.