The American Lawn
A smooth,
closely shaven surface of green is by far the
most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban house.
– Frank J. Scott, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, 1870
Between 1870 and 1890 the barriers between these two tendencies disappeared, leaving only an "imaginary line" around which played the scenes of daily life and the spectacle of suburban pastoralism. Devoid of fences, hedges, and walls, Riverside’s unified lawns formed a single apparently public visual landscape, yet their invisible property lines remained inviolate. This typical American suburban landscape is neither city nor country, neither public nor private: it is both the pastoral dream of the "cabin in the clearing" and a technological surface carved out of the wilderness.
Indeed, the lawn was soon to spread over
the whole continent as a vast platform for the performance of democracy.
Mowing, for example, turns into an important civic duty. Like more private
civilizing measures such as vacuuming and shaving, it must be performed
regularly to domesticate tenacious, unwanted natural encroachments. The
preservation of a two-inch-high verdant pile is at once the common ground
between happy neighbours, conforming to an unwritten and unspoken social
contract, and a battlefield, a competitive surface on which individual
rivalries are displayed side by side.
