the American lawn that would open with Scott’s galvanizing call to
arms
in the civilian
battle of the landscape: “A smooth, closely shaven surface of
green is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds
of
a suburban house.”
Scott, an Ohio-born student of famed New York landscape
architect
Andrew Jackson
Downing, wasn’t pushing a new idea when he published
his book in 1870, just pushing it into new places. Grass had been
used as
a design element
since the walled gardens of ancient Persia, and turf areas
were part of a Chinese emperor’s gardens as early as 100 B.C. The
idea spread
into
Europe, and by the seventeenth century formal gardens featured large
stretches of turf,
including those at Versailles. Golf began catching
on in the British Isles about five hundred years ago, and it’s impossible
to overestimate the importance that sport played not only in the research
and
development of
grass as a commodity, but in promoting the pastoral
ideal through vast stretches of green.
Immigrants brought June grass seeds to the new world, but they
did so for strictly utilitarian reasons. They’d brought sheep and
cat-
tle as well,
and the animals needed pastures to eat. To them, the
notion of planting grass to prettify the grounds surrounding a house
would have been no more acceptable than the notion of putting ear-
rings on their cows. Well into the late nineteenth century Ameri-
cans considered lawns a luxury of the upper classes, in that having
one required constant tending by scythe-swinging workers or a
large flock or herd of ruminants. George Washington, “the father of
the American lawn,” may have put in a humdinger at Mount Ver-
non, but then, he had the money and slaves to pull it off.
Frank Scott’s book, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds
of Small Extent, brought the grandiose notion of the lawn to the
masses at a time when the masses began moving to the suburbs, a
movement propelled by urban congestion, improved transportation,
and the back-to-nature sketch fantasies of the nation’s enterprising
real-estate agents, among other things. To this group. Scott offered
principles of design that he believed would achieve the greatest
amount of landscape beauty at minimal cost,” wrote David Schuler,
a
scholar who penned
the introduction to an edition of the book reis-
