Check out Todd Haiman's great post today on the evolution of the lawn. Like most landscape architects today, I try to help clients on establishing their lawn areas as sensibly as possible. Too often, an estate has a lawn that seems to roll endlessly along hillsides and besides pastures. These clients, I think, were heavily influenced by Merchant Ivory films like Howard's End. Which in turn were loosely documenting the English Garden landscapes of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. Those two, among others, were largely influenced by the picturesque landscapes of Claude Lorraine.
Now, don't get me wrong, a lawn is a wonderful part of any landscape - it provides a place for vista, scale and play. My only goal is that when a lawn is designed, it's established with sensible boundaries. Those boundaries can be programmatic (i.e., you simply don't want to mow too much lawn), ecological (you don't want to use too much fuel for your mower or water for irrigation) or physical (because, really: who wants to mow a lawn that is on a 3:1 slope?).
The lawn in American landscapes is indeed iconic and not at all a bad thing. But when we look at a picturesque landscape (perhaps, most famously Stowe House in Buckinghamshire), we should temper our reaction to the gorgeous landscape with the knowledge that countless numbers of workers (both animal and human) are hiding behind those copses of trees, waiting to furiously fight back the turf's growth.
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