Exploring the connection between grass and colonial history
By SABRINA FIGUEROA — sfigueroaavila@ucdavis.edu
One time during a Christmas family gathering, my aunt told us about a neighbor who had taken pictures of their outgrown, unkept lawn (they had just moved in) and posted these photos on a community Facebook page for the whole city to see. In the caption, the neighbor asked why anyone would ever leave their lawn like that; that it made the neighborhood “look bad.”
I laughed at that story because I didn’t think a lawn would be that important to people, especially when it wasn’t theirs. My family’s front lawn was half-dead throughout my childhood because of California’s drought, and the fact that it’s costly to maintain a nice yard — turns out that’s the critical part of the story. The reason people genuinely care about the appearance of their front lawns goes back to the 18th century and encapsulates the United States’ colonial history.
The vision of a bright green, beautifully kept lawn came from European manor houses, where a family’s lawn showcased their aesthetics, wealth and status — a visual way to keep classes divided. These expansive lawns were labor-intensive and often required expensive workers or animals to tend to them. In contrast, the land of lower classes was often used as farmland for crops or livestock. If your lawn was well kept, people knew you had a great amount of wealth.
After the U.S. became independent from Great Britain in 1776, many Europeans would visit the states and return with stories of unsophisticated American yards full of chickens and dirt — obviously not how American elites wanted to be perceived post-independence. So, they began to prioritize green grass lawns, beginning with wealthy estates and, of course, the White House.
Adopting these manicured lawns also meant adopting the connected idea of status and wealth that came with it. They had to be maintained and tended to, but instead of paying people for the time and effort required to do so, they exploited enslaved people to do the work. The idealized lawn was, once again, a sign of class division and inequalities among citizens.
Eventually, lawns became democratized in suburban areas, where more people had access to the resources necessary to maintain well-kept lawns and the idea shifted from being a status symbol to a community-centered concept. As people went outside to mow their lawns, neighbors could wave and greet them, or neighborhood children could play together on them.
While I think it was honorable of landscapers to try to create a community, many of the grasses they planted and we see today are not native to the land. Kentucky bluegrass is from Europe and northern Asia, Bermuda grass is from Africa and Zoysia grass is from East Asia — all of which are common varieties of grass used to propagate lawns across the U.S., according to an article in The New Yorker. Sometimes, these plants were intentionally brought from overseas or their seeds would travel with people unknowingly.
In fact, the beginning of the end of native plants and grasses in the Central Valley was caused by settlers unknowingly bringing grass seeds to the area. If you’ve driven through California’s central mountains or even along the coast, you may notice golden grass populating the hills during the majority of the year (or even a really bright green grass when it rains). Those are invasive grasses dating back to Spanish settlement in 1769, which continue to stunt new growth of native plants that are in competition for nutrients and space.
These non-native plants are also detrimental to our climate and environment by fueling the California wildfires. While these big green lawns and golden grasses are beautiful to look at, they are almost completely artificial, consequential and symbolic to how this very nation came to be. Like the perfect grass of a lawn, many things we find insignificant may have harsher and more critical histories behind them; don’t ignore them, look into them.
Written by: Sabrina Figueroa — sfigueroaavila@ucdavis.edu
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