Reply To: Lawn

[Greg Bish]

noise…yes, I’m with you there.

I grew up in West Virginia where lawns were large, and mowed lawn was the default condition regardless of terrain (it wasn’t unusual to see gas mowers with coils of rope attached to the handle :)…fortunately obsessive chemical lawn absolutism was the exception not the rule.

Now i live on a relatively flat 1/5 acre lot which I mow with a plug in electric mower which is relatively quiet. I also have a plug-in “leaf blower/vacuum” which informally i self-impose time restrictions on my own use. I use the blower-vac to get junk out of the beds and on to the lawn or drive where i can gather it up “the caveman way” (rakes and brooms). I sometimes want to dope slap neighbors who are out there for 2 hours on an otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon, improperly operating an obnoxiously loud gas-powered blower doing a job that could be done better in 15 minutes with a rake(at least better in terms of MY quality of life)

My thought about lawn in design are:

Why do you need one? There are infinite valid reason…but someone has to think of one for the case at hand.
How deeply is the client initiated into the Chemical Green Lawn cult?

then maybe i set these sorts of self imposed challenges:

1) What would be the limits of the lawn if we assumed theoretically that it would be maintained with a “well-maintained” manual-reel mower (if such a thing existed)?

2) What would be the limits of the lawn if we assumed theoretically that it would be maintained with a plug-in electric mower a 50′ or 60′ cord or whatever..

These sort of parameters get me thinking about the size of the lawn, the form, but also edge conditions and slopes.

I don’t dislike lawn as a ground cover. It can be unifying and even low-maintenace (or at least low-skill maintenance) if one is less obssesive about golf course-like results) , etc. I just don’t like when the chemical madness sets in, especially when there is no idea behind the choice of lawn.