Ryegrass Lawn

Lawns, it seems to me, are against nature, barren and often threadbare - the enemy of a good garden. For the same trouble as mowing, you could have a year’s vegetables: runner beans, cauliflowers and cabbages, mixed with pinks and peonies, shirley poppies and delphiniums; wouldn’t that beautify the land and save us from the garden terrorism that prevails?

— Derek Jarman (1995, p50)

A rich green all year round, aside from months of drought, the ryegrass lawn dominated the garden landscape, occupying at least half of the ground. When we were younger, the grass hosted paddling pools, trampolines, and swings; it was the field we camped on and the land we cartwheeled along. Now, the lawn mostly lays empty, aside from the occasional washing line draped around its perimeter. Looking east to west from the top floor window, the lawn was not just confined to our garden but duplicated, in various forms, along the length of the street, forming a patchwork of green between the houses of London’s suburbia.

The lawn is not a recent phenomenon, it has been a part of human-made landscapes since the neolithic revolution. In the age of hunter gatherers, life on earth existed symbiotically; ‘the landscape was formed, once and for all time, through activities of theriomorphic beings, ancestral to humans as well as to all other living things, who roamed the earth’s surface.’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 52) – but with the arrival of agricultural communities, nature was there to be claimed, tamed and owned, as land was packaged and segregated for animal grazing and planting, which lead to the birth of the lawn (Macinnis, 2009, p. 37).

During the renaissance period, the lawn began to evolve into two different types: the utility lawn and the luxury lawn. The lower classes occupied ‘utility lawns,’ which were an asset for their own survival, the grasses simply serving the purpose of production, with no aesthetic consideration (Macinnis, 2009, p. 45). Whereas, for the upper classes the lawn was the backdrop for fine dining, music and games; the evenly cut grass and immaculately trimmed edges a reminder of the capital needed for its maintenance. With the ability to spare such swathes of land for frivolous activities like lounging on a lawn, the upper classes had shaped the lawn into a symbol for their wealth, power and control (Macinnis, 2009, p. 50).

The lawn as I know it, an element in a middle-class garden, evolved following the emergence of suburbia during the industrial revolution. The rapid boom in population and improved transport connections, enabled new communities of middle and lower-middle class citizens to live on the outskirts of the city, whilst still working in the city centre. This created a clear separation between ‘work’ and ‘life’ according to socialist theorist Raymond Williams (1987, p. 213) , in which the ‘suburban home created a cosy refuge from the hectic, cutthroat economic activity of the city, not reacting against industrial capitalism but creating a spatially separate zone of familial love and comfort that was exempt from capitalism’s influence.’

The ’Suburban’s’ who occupied suburbia, according to C.F.G Masterman in ‘The condition of England’ formed an inward-looking section of society, conservative in their views and apathetic to the class conflict happening around them. Masterman described them as:

They are easily forgotten for they do not strive or cry; and for the most part only ask to be left alone. They have none of those channels of communication in their possession by which the rich and the poor can express their hostility to any political or social change. … No one fears the Middle Classes, the suburban’s and perhaps for that reason, no one respects them, … they lack organisation, energy, and ideas. They form a homogeneous civilisation – detached, self-centred, unostentatious … It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of Respectability. (Masterman,1909, p. 6–65)

For the suburbans, the ownership of a suburban home was presented as the reward for their hard work, and for Walter Benjamin, an escape from the conditions of life in a capitalist system, setting up the logic that ‘you work so you afford a place where you can forget how horrible work is.’ (Johnston-Schlee, 2022, p. 12). The suburban home became the stage set for a dream world beyond the conditions of everyday life, a fantasy concealing reality, made up of the ownership of commodity. Embodying the aesthetic of the bourgeoise in their homes, the suburban’s got to indulge in the idea of a society where the ruling class ceased to exist, and property ownership did not imply a lifetime of work (Johnston-Schlee, 2022, p. 15).

Gardens were seen as an extension of the home in suburbia and the main feature of the middle-class garden was the lawn, ‘bordered by shrubberies, flower beds, [and] fruit trees...the garden provided a strong visual confirmation of the middle-class ideal.’ (Macinnis, 2009, p. 41). The neatly mowed grasses were an ode to the renaissance gardens of the English upper class; allowing the suburban’s to create an illusion of wealth and prosperity on their small patch of land. With it’s careful framing, the lawn provided a ‘suitably grand stage to display one’s own house’ (Pollan, 1989) and capture the admiration of the street; its uniformity and consistency a part of the silent convention amongst suburban’s, that garden should be neat and tidy with the homeowner never establishing a relationship of any substance with the land. (Pollan, 1989).

By keeping the lawn, a mere two inches tall, through winter and summer, fertilising to keep it green and re-seeding the moment a patch begins to fade, the suburban garden submits fully and uncompromisingly to human control. In Michael Pollan’s 1989 essay ‘Why Mow? The case against lawns’ he divulges this controlling relationship between middle class suburbia and the lawn; he says:

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of selfdetermination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. (Pollan, 1989)

But perhaps, in our garden the lawn is controlling us as much as we are controlling the lawn. Culturally, the lawn is a device which semiotically conveys values of submission and homogeneity among the middle classes; the lawn directing us to continue the cycle of uniformity and suppression to the ideas set out by the governing elite. Using Foucault theories from ‘Discipline and Punish’ (1979) the lawn in all its visibility, could be perceived as a form of disciplinary power since Foucault states that power is not just held by individuals or institutions but present across society through cultural practices:

Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially by arranging objects. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification. (Foucault, 1979, p. 30)