In 1870, a little-known
landscape architect published a book
that changed the face of
America—and continues to ruin weekends.
Nothing so vividly underscores the peculiar American fasc-
ination with the lawn than
the Dixie Chopper Jet. At its debut, that
custom mower was equipped with a 150-horsepower jet engine
designed to help power a Chinook helicopter. It could reach speeds
of up to 70 miles per hour. With its fat rear tires and massive power
plant, which juts off the back like the business end of an overweight
bumblebee, the Dixie Chopper Jet could mow an entire football
field in fourteen minutes. It remains the envy of every member of
the seven hundred-member Illinois-based United States Lawn
Mower Racing Association.
In any other culture, the mere existence of such a machine
would seem like a demented fever dream. In the United States,
though, where 46.5 million acres of grass are under cultivation, the
Dixie Chopper Jet
achieved a hallowed place among those dedicated
souls to whom lawn care is less a duty than a lifestyle choice. Word
of it spread not only through news media reports,
but the jet-
powered
mower became somewhat of a celebrity because of its
appearances on television shows such as Good Morning America and a
memorable season finale of Home Improvement.
One can’t help but wonder what impression the Dixie Chopper
Jet would have made on Frank Jessup Scott, the obscure nineteenth-
century landscape architect at whose feet we must lay much of the
credit, or blame, for the American lawn obsession. How would Scott
react to this mower on steroids, or to the stunning reality that,
according to the Lawn Institute, a Georgia-based nonprofit organ-
ization dedicated to the promulgation of turf, more grass is under
cultivation in the United States than any single crop, including
wheat, corn, or tobacco? What would he make of Americans’ will-
ingness to spend between $25 billion and $30 billion a year on do-
it-yourself lawn and garden care, or of the estimated $750 1mlliofl
a
year they shell
out for grass seed to perpetuate the Sisyphian cycle of
mowable new growth? Could the author of a landmark Victorian
gardening guidebook ever have imagined that American communi-
ties would someday fine or prosecute homeowners whose lawn care
was considered inadequate, or that in 1998 the Canadian Center for
