Lawn
AFTER FINISHING A THREE-ARTICLE focus on cob construction — building houses, other structures, and furniture out of earth — I began thinking about sod. Cottages are a literal scaping of the land into human habitation, terraforming the very earth into shelters; sod has been used for some of the same purposes here ion North America. The difference between the two is that cob is dry straw mixed into sub-soil, while sod is the first few inches of the topsoil, which contains the rhizomatic roots of the living grass that grows on top of it. So if we can include cob objects in our landscape designs, what’s possible in the way of sod structures?
TWO DAYS AGO, I promised you a blog about clover lawns as an alternative to grass. Then I took you time-travelling into history to understand the back-story. In Part I, Clover the Hills and Far Away, and Part II, Clover and Over Again, I explained how the artistic imagination of the Middle Ages triggered a new paradigm for gardening during the Renaissance. You’ve got to know where you’re coming from, if you want to figure out where you’re going, right? So now in Part III, Clover and Out, I will talk about how this new paradigm has perverted our senses of space and society, our relationships with nature and culture, and left us with a chemical legacy of lifeless monoculture. And finally, I won’t only talk about the problem, but I’ll suggest some possible solutions. So, one more time, what’s wrong with our good friend green grass, and why would we want to examine any alternatives?
“LOOK INTO CLOVER LAWNS.” I like it that I’m not the only one raising eco-initiatives at Green Apple. Victor is Lead Hand out in the field, and I’m pushing pixels back at the office, so he handed me the brief: Why the hay are we putting down hardly anything except for green grass? It turns out that, despite their nomenclature, of the two species of grasses that we use with our clients — Kentucky Bluegrass and Sheep’s Fescue — neither of them are native to North America. So why do we keep using them time and time again, by default? For that matter, why are ninety-nine per cent of the people on this continent carpeting their properties with identical kinds of turf, without question? To find out the answer, I decided to do some serious research into the history of horticulture.
