Trapped on society’s mowercoaster ride: why lawns are an invisible cage

“I wondered if we owned the lawn or the lawn owned us.”

These are the words of Ken Ilgunas in The New York Times, writing about growing up in a neighbourhood surrounded by an ocean of turf.

Maybe these sentiments ring a bell. If you’re coming up to the cottage and spending a couple of hours each weekend mowing the lawn, then you might wonder whose relaxation is it, anyway?

An invisible cage

The lawn and its associated tidy landscaping of shrubs and mulch have a grip on the Canadian psyche.
Maybe it’s because we’re so nice; we don’t want to offend, so we fit in. We feel it’s better to belong to the pack than be cast out, so we carry on in this invisible cage.

Sometimes the cage becomes codified, as those of us in a condominium or a homeowners’ association regulated development might attest.

While we think we’re happy fitting in, the sprinkler fitters, the mower makers, the fertilizer and herbicide vendors… they’re all very happy indeed. And so the runaway mowercoaster careens on.

Choosing life

To the tidy-minded, nature appears inherently messy. But the fact is, an ecologically functioning landscape is incompatible with shaved lawns and clipped monocultures.

If a tidy garden is a dead garden, we have to decide if we’re going to choose life.

That’s not to say nature’s apparent disorder is a sign of chaos. As ecological landscaping pioneer Larry Weaner says, nature is highly ordered and anything but random. We just don’t see it unless we know what to look for.

Mess and control

A lot of this comes down to control. We want to be in control in a chaotic world, so we control nature. We like to have flowers and leaves, but only the type of greenery that knows who’s boss.

Which is why we and our planet are in a mess and why we can be happy and thrive if we dance with nature instead of fighting it. True control is in coexistence, in knowing how we fit in with the rest of the world.

Fitting in

I see this tension sometimes when I visit potential clients. I sense a nervousness coupled with a desire. They want to break the rules but they’re not sure if they should.

That’s why I put together a guide on working with condominiums, homeowners’ associations – and neighbours. You can read it here.

In it, I say native plant gardening in these situations isn’t about letting your landscape go wild. Instead, it’s about understanding ecological processes and working with them in a structured way. It’s about starting small, leaving some lawn for ball games if you wish, making well-defined borders, choosing plants that don’t grow too tall or take over, and having a proper management routine.

It’s about pushing the boundaries of acceptability so carefully that nobody notices until one day a neighbour stops by your driveway and admires the butterflies instead of tutting at the “weeds.”

And above all, it’s about truly fitting in. Not with the manufactured desires of society but with the real desires of the rest of the world.