I am standing in a street not far from my home in Sydney. It is mostly unexceptional – a mix of redbrick detached and semi-detached houses, plantings of melaleucas and scrubby, dark-barked callistemons. Indeed, the only unusual thing is that whereas in most streets around it verges are grass, here there is a small stencil reading “no mow” on the footpath, and, behind it the verge is given over to an assortment of native grasses and low groundcovers instead of lawn.
This verge and others like it are the result of a program initiated by the local council, under which residents are able to ask to have the grass in front of their houses left uncut. That may seem a small change, but it is also symbolic of a larger shift with the place of lawn in Australian cities, and, just possibly, a deeper renegotiation with the relationship the landscape more generally.
Lawn is ubiquitous in Australian cities. Public spaces such as parks are designed around wide expanses of cut grass, turf covers sports fields and school ovals, and most private houses still feature at least small patches of lawn. In the suburbs and country towns it covers nature strips, verges and median strips, carpeting the ground that is not covered by trees and other plants. The smell of freshly cut lawn and dry grass lies deep in the sense memory of many of us, as does the heavy thrum of the sprinklers that pump water on to the sleepy spaces of school ovals and parks in the summer. Indeed, lawn – and the physical, cultural and imaginary space it gives shape to – is so fundamental to the Australian psyche that few of us even think about it, except occasionally when confronted by its absence.
Yet how exactly did lawn come to dominate not just Australian cities, but cities around the world? After all, while grasses are one of the most successful types of plant on Earth, growing on every continent, and covering around 40% of the planet’s land surface, lawns are monocultures made up of a handful of species that require frequent watering, fertiliser and – often – pesticides. As Michael Pollan once quipped, lawn is “nature under totalitarian rule”.
However despite their ubiquity the origins of lawns are surprisingly mysterious. At its most basic lawn is simply a form of meadow, made up of grasses that are soft and amenable to being cut short. Yet where and when those qualities became desirable, and the idea of a lawn as something conceptually and aesthetically distinct from open ground or land for grazing is not exactly clear. Even the origin of the word is difficult to pin down, with some authorities arguing it derives from the old French word laund, or lande, which meant heath or barren land, and others arguing it comes from the Middle English word for a place of wildflowers, launde, or even the Breton word lann, or heath.
What we do know is that the cultivation of areas of short-cut grass began in monasteries and the gardens of the nobility in Britain and northern France during the middle ages. By the 16th century the idea of lawn as something that connected the various elements of gardens had been established, and by the 17th and 18th century lawns had become an essential part of the design of formal gardens.
From the beginning lawns encoded complex cultural meanings, and moral, as well as aesthetic qualities. In medieval gardens, where they often featured flowers, their greenness was associated with fertility and rebirth, and their floral elements with the Garden of Eden; later their tranquillity came to be associated with order and stability, and later again with pleasure and recreation. As grassed areas grew larger, and therefore more expensive to maintain, their scale became a signifier of wealth and power, while the vistas they afforded allowed the splendour of the residences of the rich to be seen from a distance.
These associations grew more complex as European powers expanded across the world. From the Americas to Asia and India, colonial societies sought to reshape the landscape in ways that recreated the familiar vistas of Europe, integrating lawns into new systems of social and environmental control.
Lawn, control and the colony
Nowhere was this more true than in Australia. Prior to European invasion large areas of the Australian continent were characterised by a mixture of trees and grass that was the result of millennia of controlled burning by Indigenous Australians. To early European visitors the results of this process were oddly familiar: Sydney Parkinson, Joseph Banks’ draughtsman, famously compared the topography of what is now Sydney to “plantations in a gentleman’s park”.
Ciaron Dunn is an ecologist and horticulturist with the Coffs Harbour and District Local Aboriginal Lands Council. A Gumbaynggir man, and part of the Kelly family from Yellow Rock, he says “the only difference between the parkscape that Parkinson talked about and the Botanical Gardens in Sydney today is the size and species mix of the trees. And you’re talking about ankle length grass as opposed to toe height grass. But it was still easy to walk through.”
Some European invaders adopted the fire regime of the original owners of the land they stole in order to maintain the grassy landscapes for cattle and sheep; others simply felled the trees and cleared the undergrowth. But even as farmers and graziers were transforming the wider landscape, others were creating gardens.
Many of these early gardens were intended to supply foods familiar to the invaders, but they were also a way of creating a recognisable environment in an alien landscape. Lawns played an integral part in this process, the pastoral ideal they embodied the antithesis of the perceived harshness and roughness of the Australian landscape. There was a practical dimension to this, of course: especially in hot, dry climates, lawns made outdoor areas usable, and helped keep dust and dirt at bay. But given their association with order and prosperity they also quickly assumed a moral dimension. La Trobe University environmental historian Prof Katie Holmes says that by the 20th-century lawns had come to be associated with ideas of civic virtue. “A healthy lawn was a sign you had your house in order. It reflected somebody who was diligent and attentive and had the moral qualities that were expected in a citizen.”
At a larger scale they also suggested a permanence and control that assuaged anxieties about the fragility of colonial control. Andrea Gaynor, professor of history at the University of Western Australia, argues that while some settlers appreciated the beauty of Australian landscape from early on, that “didn’t override the necessity to provide a civilised veneer that meant the colony could project an image of itself as stable, settled and prosperous, and therefore an attractive field for investment. So the cultural aspect is deeply entwined with the economics of the whole enterprise.” Simultaneously lawns helped encode and reinforce racial and social hierarchies. “Lawns were understood by Perth’s white residents as the antithesis of, and vastly superior to, Indigenous landscapes and cultures,” says Gaynor.
As Australian cities expanded outwards into the suburbs after the second world war, these associations took on new forms. “The lawn signified affluence and a demarcation between the industrialised space of the city and the home and family life,” says Holmes, who notes lawns also “signalled home ownership, because the lawn of a homeowner was assumed to be better maintained than that of somebody who rented.”
Life after lawns
As the vast, manicured sports fields that surround the most expensive private schools or the sprawling golf courses that occupy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land in the inner suburbs of Australia’s cities eloquently demonstrate, lawns continue to act as powerful signifiers of wealth and social status. Yet in recent years, as rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns have made maintaining lawns more challenging and expensive, their dominance of urban spaces has begun to wane.
Holmes believes this process has been accelerated by social and economic changes. “We don’t have as many lawns as we once did. There are a variety of reasons for that. Block sizes have shrunk, and houses have grown, so outdoor space has been reduced. There’s the rise of outdoor living where space that would have been lawn is paved or decked. Fashions in gardens have changed, so you have denser planting. And I think there’s also just the fact that people don’t want to spend every Saturday or Sunday morning mowing the lawn.”
Justin Buckley is Gardens Manager for the National Trust Victoria. A horticulturist by training, he began his career as a gardener at Rippon Lea in Melbourne’s south-east. He agrees attitudes to lawn have begun to change. “I started as a gardener just before the millennium drought. Back then we’d just put sprinklers out on the lawns and run them all night. But when the water restrictions started to kick in, one of the really interesting things was watching the progressive dying off of different species of grasses that made up the lawns, as the less hardy ones disappeared one by one. The ones that disappeared first have never come back. We just don’t grow them any more.”
Buckley says that process has permanently altered the mix of grass species used in Melbourne. “Outside of high-end, sporting turf environments there’s just no discussion any more about which grasses you use in Melbourne. You’d be mad to plant anything but a couple of really hardy summer grasses.”
The expense and difficulty of maintaining lawns has also driven increasing use of artificial turf in private homes and on school ovals and sports fields. But while artificial lawns may be cheaper to maintain, they are catastrophic for soil ecosystems and leach microplastics into soil, groundwater and the ocean.
Elsewhere the calculations around lawns have been quite different. In Perth, where rainfall has declined about 20% over the past half a century, and inflow to dams has dropped even more substantially, the city’s love affair with its lawns and gardens means per capita water consumption remains far higher than in other Australian capitals. “It’s remarkable,” says Gaynor. “Even in a drying climate we’d rather run desal[ination] plants than do away with lawn. It really shows how deeply ingrained lawn is in Australian culture as a symbol of civilisation and environmental control.”
Powerful as these assumptions are, there are signs they are unravelling. On a damp, blowy day in July I meet Teealia Scott in a park in Sydney’s inner west. Scott is coordinator of the Inner West council’s urban ecology project, which aims to restore pre-colonial ecosystems in selected areas. In this park that has meant dividing off one section of the park and removing introduced grasses so native grasses and ground covers can re-establish themselves.
At first glance the area looks like it has been left to run wild. But in a reminder of the way our attachment to lawn continues to shape the way we see the environment around us, it is nothing of the sort. Instead, as Scott leads me through the space she points out humped masses of wallaby and weeping grass, the green, juicy leaves of tiny dichondras, and the darker stems of trefoils sprouting among the leaf litter, all remnants of the now-critically endangered Sydney turpentine ironbark forest ecosystem that existed here before European invasion.
These species have not been planted, instead they have sprouted naturally from the seedbank in the soil once lawn mowing ceased and invasive species were removed. Scott sees their survival as “the definition of resilience … they’ve survived a century or more of suppression and still managed to reestablish themselves once more. That proves this is a really resilient landscape, and that we haven’t lost it all, which is amazing given that over the past 250 years we’ve done our level best to trash it.”
Scott says allowing natural species to re-establish themselves has clear ecological benefits. “We have more than 30 species of native grass and ground cover here now, as opposed to the one or two you have in lawn. The structural diversity creates all sorts of niches. So different insects can live here, different lizards can find a home, shelter for breeding, laying eggs. And birds will come along to forage in the grasses and the ground covers as well.” But she also sees it as part of a wider ethic of care. “These native areas are carefully and skilfully maintained, but there’s still a tendency to see them as unkempt or unmanaged, which just perpetuates colonial attitudes about native landscapes needing taming and structure rather than acceptance and care.”
Dunn argues regenerating natural systems can also help alter the way we think about urban ecologies. “For me as an ecologist it’s better to think about how we can refine what we have, and how we can add to pre-existing values.”
Prof Maria Ignatieva is a landscape architect and urban ecologist at the University of Western Australia, and the coordinator of Lawn as a Living Lab, a multidisciplinary project exploring sustainable lawn solutions. She argues for a holistic approach that mixes different elements ranging from planted lawns to natural areas like the ones Scott is working on. “In urban environments sustainability is about management. Planning, design, where you put particular types of green space and plant communities.”
Changing conditions demand a move away from lawn as a central feature of urban design, agrees Buckley, although he expects lawn is likely to remain part of the mix. “As a horticulturist I’m glad we’re getting to the point where people are appreciating that we need more diversity in what we plant. But we also want to provide the amenity people need, not just that connection with nature, but somewhere they can sit and kids can run around. And lawn is still the cheapest way to do that.”
