Being fortunate to live in your community, I really enjoyed watching your front lawn transform into an edible vibrant landscape in our mostly-manicured neighborhood! Your sharing of background work on human-neighbor cultivation is as interesting as the plantings themselves.
This post also reminds me of "The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession" by V Jenkins which I reviewed as our local Ecology Action Center was developing it's Yard Smart Program. The book narrative reads like a PhD dissertation, thick with facts. But what I found especially fascinating was a section on visuals plates advertising lawn mowers in the late 1800s & beyond, marketing the idea of "grass cutting simplified" (even your wife or kid or dog could do it; of course it was not.) The front lawn was to be an extension of the parlor - not functional like previous front yards grazing messy animals etc. Then the ads for chemicals began after WWII (using war language like "Give em hell" a wife says to her husband spraying weeds) which enabled monoculture lawns, demoting once-prized clover to a weed.
It's yet a reminder that turf lawns are cultural creations. And edible vibrant pollinator-attracting yards can be too. Thanks for demonstrating this in your own front & back yard (and our neighborhood).
Finally, I love imagining people as trees, beautiful gnarls and all!
Being fortunate to live in your community, I really enjoyed watching your front lawn transform into an edible vibrant landscape in our mostly-manicured neighborhood! Your sharing of background work on human-neighbor cultivation is as interesting as the plantings themselves.
This post also reminds me of "The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession" by V Jenkins which I reviewed as our local Ecology Action Center was developing it's Yard Smart Program. The book narrative reads like a PhD dissertation, thick with facts. But what I found especially fascinating was a section on visuals plates advertising lawn mowers in the late 1800s & beyond, marketing the idea of "grass cutting simplified" (even your wife or kid or dog could do it; of course it was not.) The front lawn was to be an extension of the parlor - not functional like previous front yards grazing messy animals etc. Then the ads for chemicals began after WWII (using war language like "Give em hell" a wife says to her husband spraying weeds) which enabled monoculture lawns, demoting once-prized clover to a weed.
It's yet a reminder that turf lawns are cultural creations. And edible vibrant pollinator-attracting yards can be too. Thanks for demonstrating this in your own front & back yard (and our neighborhood).
Finally, I love imagining people as trees, beautiful gnarls and all!