Lawns now blanket thirty million acres of the United States, but until the late nineteenth century few Americans had any desire for a front lawn, much less access to seeds for growing one. In her comprehensive history of this uniquely American obsession, Virginia Scott Jenkins traces the origin of the front lawn aesthetic, the development of the lawn-care industry, its environmental impact, and modern as well as historic alternatives to lawn mania.
Virginia Scott Jenkins is a scholar in residence at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, Maryland.
Lawns now blanket thirty million acres of the United States, but until the late nineteenth century few Americans had any desire for a front lawn, much less access to seeds for growing one. In her comprehensive history of this uniquely American obsession, Virginia Scott Jenkins traces the origin of the front lawn aesthetic, the development of the lawn-care industry, its environmental impact, and modern as well as historic alternatives to lawn mania.
Virginia Scott Jenkins is a scholar in residence at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, Maryland.
Virginia Scott Jenkins is a scholar in residence at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, Maryland.
“Virginia Scott Jenkins shows that this uniquely American landscape
form is not a native one: indigenous New World grasses were munched
into extinction by the colonists’ Old World livestock, and the very
concept of the lawn was borrowed from the romantic English parks of
Capability Brown and from the French tapis vert. The gradual
suburbanization and the shaming tactics of appearance-minded
neighbors led America to become completely besotted with grass—and
lawn care.”—New Yorker
“Jenkins makes a convincing argument that the military metaphors
used by advertisers and lawn care experts alike were part of a male
viewpoint that saw nature as something to be ‘controlled and
mastered.’ This summer could be much more fun if readers ignore
their own lawns and stick to Jenkins’s.”—Publishers Weekly
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