GRAFTON — A vegetable garden was the big story from Oak Park, Michigan this past summer.
Julie and Jason Bass had uprooted their front lawn, built raised beds, and planted some seeds. Voila! Lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, herbs!
Their neighbor complained to city planner Kevin Rulkowski that the garden “disrupted the look of the neighborhood.” Rulkowski agreed, citing an ordinance requiring that city lawns contain “suitable” plant materials consisting of grass, trees, and flowers.
Lawyers were hired, all parties went to court, and Julie's garden still grows.
These tiresome tales keep popping up like Whac-a-Moles in the shooting gallery at the demons' carnival. They should be weeded out at inception, tossed in the compost bin, and allowed to decompose into more fertile narratives.
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In the mid-1980s, when I lived in Chadds Ford, Pa., Ted Browning, landscape architect and conservationist, testified in court for a homeowner who had planted a native wildflower garden in her front yard.
Ted explained that, unlike turf grass, most native species are drought resistant and don't require much, if any, irrigation. Nor do they demand copious amounts of pesticides or weekly buzz-cuts with gas-powered mowers.
The wildflowers, he said, would attract birds, bees, butterflies, and earthworms, vital to soil health. (About 60 percent of earthworms are killed by pesticides.)
The judge agreed that the “alternative” lawn was a boon to the neighborhood, and the homeowner won her case.
After the end of the Civil War, landscape architects began designing vast expanses of lawns for the new suburbs: one contiguous ribbon of green where white people - also part of the color scheme - could bask in the illusion of a holy democracy.
In 1870, influential landscape architect Frank J. Scott advised: “let your lawn be your home's velvet robe, and your flowers its not too promiscuous decoration.” Others joined the choir and asserted that people had a “moral obligation” to mow.
Those who didn't participate in the ritual were branded “unchristian,” and our ancestors got lawn care confused with piety and patriotism.
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Millions of Americans are still deeply entrenched in their concept of lawns. A recent EPA study reports that nearly one third of our residential water is used to maintain “the look” of those precious velvet robes.
Every year, 70 million pounds of pesticides are dumped on 50,000 square miles of lawns and golf courses, at a cost of approximately $30 billion. We pay the price not only in dollars, but in damage to our health and our environment, which are inseparable.
Michael Pollan posited a credible explanation for our national pathology in his book Second Nature: A Gardener's Education. “Time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
A decade after Ted Browning's testimony, creative citizens all over the country were retiring their mowers. Undaunted by intimations of sex and death, they were replacing their lawns with meadows, prairie grasses, moss, and ground covers. In Fort Collins, Colo. and Long Grove, Ill., tax credits were given to residents who planted native species.
There must have been a news blackout in Chadds Ford. A resident of a nearby development complained to her homeowners' association that her neighbor had planted “too many flowers.”
I pedaled my bicycle a mile down the road to see what “too many flowers” looked like. I saw a profusion of impeccably tended daisies, anemones, dahlias, and other bright blossoms. The color scheme was riotous; a startling contrast to the surrounding “robes,” barren of adornment except for a few rhododendrons and yew bushes lined up like soldiers along the front walls of the other houses.
I couldn't imagine the danger of “too many flowers.” Were they were plotting a rebellion? Would their promiscuous behavior blow the artificial heart out of suburbia? What next? Pagan sex in the cul-de-sacs?
The whole blooming affair caused my spirit to wilt.
Although the complaint was dismissed, I feared for Mother Nature's future. Maybe she was tied and bound in the “robe.” She hadn't ordered it and she didn't try it , but she was paying for it anyway.
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The news from Oak Park has led me to contemplate the shameless turpitude of fruits, vegetables, and herbs; the succulent juice of the ripe peach; the come-hither fragrances of rosemary and lemon balm; the voluptuous, seductive curves of tomatoes and eggplants.
Such flagrant uprisings of fecundity will eventually topple the Lawn Doctor's totalitarian rule, but they will live in peace with thoughtfully tended lawns.
Children will always need grassy places where they can turn cartwheels and walk on their hands.
On clear summer nights, stargazers will always want to lie in the cool, damp grass and watch the meteor showers.
After the revolution of those brazen vegetables, fruits, flowers, and indigenous species, our landscape will be a true democracy.
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When Pollan wrote Second Nature in 1991, he proposed the garden as “a middle landscape - a place that might partake equally of nature and culture, that might seek to strike some sort of compromise or balance between the two realms.”
Pollan might have been envisioning the habitat that Margie Ruddick, an award-winning landscape architect who has devoted her career to sustainable designs, has allowed to flourish at her home in Mount Airy, Pa.
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In a recent New York Times article, Anne Haver traced the evolution of Ruddick's “middle landscape.”In 2005, she stopped mowing, preserving only a grassy area where her children can play.
Now she has mowed paths through the wild asters, raspberries, rose of sharon, and pokeweed that have sprung up under the emerging canopy of volunteer oaks and black cherry trees. This joyous marriage of nature and culture is irrigated by rainwater funneled from the roof.
In March, Ruddick was summoned to a meeting with a city hearings officer. She'd been threatened with a fine because her “weeds” exceeded the proscribed height of 10 inches “in violation of the property maintenance code.”
Ruddick showed the officer photos of her garden and cited the botanical names of every species. The photos revealed the lush surprise of austerity.
That's not an oxymoron - it's what happens when we consort with nature. Today, Ruddick's yard is marked with a National Wildlife Federation sign that proclaims “Certified Wildlife Habitat.”
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Someday, similar gardens will become “the look of the neighborhood.”
They won't be governed by adherents of unsustainable ordinances and covenants written to protect mindless, irresponsible conformity rather than health and diversity. They will tell a new story.
Deleted from the script will be the stock characters: the irate neighbors nattering about “property values,” the police, the lawyers, and the judges. The themes will reflect the cycle of life: sex, death, and rebirth.
And nature will be the guest of honor at the garden party.