The Case for Losing the Traditional Lawn | Armonk Real Estate

I’m already nostalgic for this past summer. Warm days spent frolicking outside, picnics, ice cream, birds chirping and the nonstop sound of lawnmowers as the smell of freshly cut grass wafts over the garden. But that sweet grass smell is a chemical reaction, a warning signal that the lawn has been wounded and now it’s now open to attack by pests. And as a nation, the U.S. tosses 23 million tons of lawn clippings a year into already bursting landfills — material that could be turned into free fertilizer, namely compost.
Television and radio ads work hard to convince you that your landscape is imperfect and impure if you don’t slave over it, using fertilizers and pesticides and weed killers. Images of suburban cowboy husbands persist, wrangling weeds and farming one of the largest and most useless crops in the world.
Lawns are a noble’s ideal, literally, and since the 1800s Americans have been trying to emulate expansive aristocratic estates in Europe on quarter-acre lots. What’s the deal with lawn? And how and why should we lose some of it?