The Problem With Lawns

Lawns, as expanses of verdant private land, were invented as a status signal.

English aristocrats in the 17th and 18th centuries maintained vast stretches of grass to demonstrate they had so much land that they didn't need all of it for production. Grass that cows don't need to eat and farmers don't need to rake.

Having a lawn in the 1700s signalled: "I'm so wealthy I can afford to grow nothing useful." The only benefit a private lawn could have was aesthetic.

And this show of status came at great cost.

Keeping grass short and uniform required armies of groundskeepers with scythes. Keeping it green and healthy required careful tending. Only the genuinely wealthy could maintain one.

Then one day, the lawnmower was invented, and suddenly the middle class could maintain an aristocratic signal. Post-war American suburbs embraced lawns as proof they'd arrived: Manicured green grass, tidy borders, and a white picket fence became the American dream.

The original reason for lawns – demonstrating you don't need productive agriculture – is now meaningless for the masses. Most people with lawns (or gardens in the UK) don't have the option of farming anyway.

We face no tradeoff between lawns and crops. We're choosing lawns over any other productive use of the space. A larger house. An extra parking space. Etc.

But now that gardens and lawns have become ubiquitous, it's hard to imagine a 'family home' without one. It's something so many people dream of. Something once a luxury now seems essential.

If you ask someone why they need a lawn, they'll say it's for the children to play outside. A safe fenced space for kids to run around. They'll say this, like I do, even when simply envisioning future children that don't yet exist.

Ironically meanwhile, children's outdoor play has declined dramatically over the past few decades. Kids spend less time outside than any previous generation. The justification for maintaining lawns as spaces for children describes behaviour that's largely disappeared.

Kids used to play outside beyond fences. Now they often play inside behind windows.

But this reveals that our preference for having gardens has largely been a post-hoc rationalisation. We decided we wanted gardens decades ago and now we need new reasons for them.

It's a form of hedonic adaptation.

Once you have something, it stops feeling like a luxury and starts feeling like a necessity. You genuinely can't imagine living without it, even when the original purpose has evaporated.

Americans in particular spend billions of hours annually on lawn care. Lawns consume enormous amounts of water, particularly absurd in places like Arizona and Southern California, where grass shouldn't naturally grow. We terraform entire environments to maintain an English aristocratic tradition transplanted to climates that make no ecological sense for it.

Rob Henderson coined, as far as I'm aware, the term "luxury beliefs" to describe ideas which confer status on the upper class while imposing costs on everyone else.

This isn't an essay against gardens or grass — I love both. I have a decent-sized garden (for a home in London), and I love to walk in fields and woods, and to ramble through thickets.

But I use lawns here as a synonym for other things. Things you once took on as a luxury and now see as a baseline expectation. Things you've accepted as heuristics of 'the way life should be', or 'a sign that you've made it', without unpacking the underlying assumptions to even be sure that they hold true for you.