FIRST OF ALL, THERE’S TOPIARY, the calculated pruning of small trees and shrubs to create mathematical patterns or life-size sculptures. Evergreen trees with dense foliage and small needles, like holly and myrtle, are trimmed from infancy in order to create the illusion of a solid object that resembles its real-world counterpart. Sometimes a number of plants are pleached together to form one large object out of several smaller shrubs. In other cases, the plants are grown out of a wire mesh that has been bent into the desire shape, or some other pre-existing endo-skeletal structure. The results can be cute, or considered kitsch.

NOW DID YOU KNOW that European settlers in the midwestern states and the prairie provinces once built houses out of sod? Yes, here is a photo from just over a hundred years ago, taken in Saskatchewan, of a family of farmers in front of their humble home. Obviously, there was no color photography at that time, the image has since been computer-colourized. But it is otherwise an authentic artifact, recorded proof that some of the first New Canadians fashioned for themselves houses out of sod, complete with green roof growing on top. They probably had the lowest possible carbon footprint out of any permanent dwelling, ever!

SINCE AT LEAST 1996, people in Portland have been building cob couches and other sculptures out of earth. And it turns out that in the UK, the same is true for sod. At the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, earth artists have invoked the green gods, nephilim made from mud. Mounds of earth covered in various grasses to effect different textures, the Giant’s Head and the Mud Maidens guard the land and instill a sense of awe. And over at the Eden Project, the world largest greenhouse (also in Cornwall), sod sculptors Sue and Pete Hill raised another majestic Moss Maiden from the ground, this one sitting straight up. Beautiful!

NOW ARCHITECT-ARTIST GREG TATE out in Orange County, California has taken the concept of sod sculpture and has placed function over form, creating sod sofas! He came up with the idea of sprouting a couch, creating literal lawn furniture! And he’s been kind enough to share his idea with the world, publishing instructions for how to make a D-I-Y couch that’s covered in clover. It’s pretty simple: basically, just use temporary forms, pack the mud into whatever shape you want, then cover it in chicken wire and rolls of sod. How easy is that? It may seem a little cheesy, but I still want to build one, it looks like tonnes of fun! Could you imagine one of these in your own yard?

1. Figure the dirt you need by multiplying the dimensions of the couch you plan to make (Height x Width x Depth = Volume of Earth).
2. Next, locate a suitable spot. Placement is key: There’ll be no moving once you’ve begun. Clear the area of grass and weeds until you have a level swath of dirt, then use a stick to sketch the shape of the couch into the dirt with a stick.
3. Drive the wood stakes into the ground along the perimeter of your sofa-shaped sketch, every 18” or so, to a depth of about 12”. These will secure the form.
4. Attach the waferboard to the stakes to create the walls of the form (see illustration). Use a handsaw to trim the waferboard to size. Drive in a nail every 4” along each stake to secure the boards.
5. Start shoveling dirt into the form. Here’s where things get messy. Once a foot of dirt is in place, water lightly and compress by stomping around on top of it.
6. Once the basic shape is in place and secure, carefully remove the form works.
7. Mold the shape to your liking. Remove any loose debris and sprinkle the sofa and other areas you’ll be sodding with a healthy layer of fertilizer and gypsite. Water lightly.
8. For extra support, lay strips of poultry netting over the arms and back.
9. Lay the sod. Press down the edges to create a smooth surface clear to the ground. Stagger the rows so the seams don’t fall in a line, and use chopsticks or planting stakes to keep them in place over the wire.
10. During the next few weeks, water your sofa often, soaking it thoroughly. Once the sod has taken root, remove the chopsticks or planting stakes. Trim as needed.

GRASSY LAWNS HAD come to be associated with upper-class status in the minds of the rest of us peasants. And so some of the first important public parks on this continent, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, were designed with the English pastoralist style in mind. But until the Second Industrial Revolution about a hundred and fifty years ago, most of the North American Continent was covered with moss and shrub. The average person couldn’t possibly afford a retinue of caretakers to constantly monitor the length of the lawn and incessantly scythe it down to mere centimetres. It wasn’t until the rise of the machines that manicured lawns were within the reach of the commoners. With the arrival of the lawn mower by the mid-1800s and the first fossil-fuel-powered mower emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, average Joes and Janes could adopt the tropes of the ridiculously prosperous and simulate at least the appearance of affluence.

moss

scrub

TODAY, EXACTLY HALF of the world’s population lives in urban areas; here in Canada, that rate is as high as four-fifths, and in Ontario it’s even more than that. A mock meadow has no meaning in a metropolitan Toronto: you can’t take your flock of sheep out to graze on the grass; you can’t possibly take a long, romantic walk in the woods; and you certainly can’t get lost in the forest, enchanted by the wondrousness of it all. You are bound in by fences and borders, enclosed on all sides with stick pickets and chain links. At most, you can take the domesticated dog outside so he doesn’t defecate on your carpet. You can make a fake firepit and burn a meaty meal on open coals, brought in by rail from a coal mine on the east coast of the country. You can nuke the lawn till it’s more florescent than anything else that grows on the Goddess’ green earth, but I’m sorry to say it, your little slice of heaven remains short of satisfying.

ASSUMING THAT YOU CAN’T see yourself anthropomorphizing blades of grass and that it doesn’t trouble you at all to continually castrate the sex of these small green creatures (which is how the grass experiences lawn mowing), and that you’ve got lots of disposable income so you don’t mind paying labourers to mow the lawn often — there’s still the matter of chemical maintainance. When they’re in the wild, grasses don’t keep green from May to September, they’re only emerald for a few weeks at a time, after which they fade to a pale pastel. Exactly a century ago, the first artificial fertilizers were invented to mess with the chemistry of the grass and trick it into staying jade green all season long. Then military-industrial R & D gave us the means to more efficiently kill off all the other species on the lawn without the exhausting, almost impossible task of weeding: herbicides and insecticides. So now we wage carcinogenic chemical warfare on the earth itself. And for what? To keep up with the Windsors?

lawn

Painting by Leonard Koscianski

THERE ARE ALL KINDS of alternatives that would be preferable to the grassy status quo, things you can let your lawn do. But the first proposal I can come up with off the top of my head is clover. Until the 1950’s, clover was considered to be a desirable item. But when the chemical corporations realized that their marketable products killed off clover as well as the other weeds, they re-branded clover as evil. How fickle and foolish we were to have bought their propaganda! Clover remains incandescent green as long as it’s pleasant to be outside, and can’t be discoloured, even by canine urine. It flourishes in sub-standard soil, fixing nitrogen into it, actually improving soil quality. It wages a war on weeds for you, crowding them out by natural selection. It demands so very little from you, only a small amount of water, much less than grass. And it certainly doesn’t need to be mowed — it automatically grows to a height of about twenty centimetres, and stays there perpetually.

THE ONLY THING you could possibly say against clover is that bees love it. And some people — especially little people — don’t necessarily love bees back. That humans have almost eradicated the natural habitats of bees, threatening them with extinction, and jeopardizing our own survival on this planet at the same time, since bees pollenate one-third of all human food — is a topic for another blog entry. But for now, let’s just settle the clover question by arming ourselves with the knowledge that maintaining a whole host of different types of flora in your yard will ensure a diversity of species — including insects — naturally keeping the bees in check. And if you’re planning on using it in a high-traffic area, then you want to mix it up with other ground-cover anyway. The idiom “to be in clover” even means to live the good life, carefree and easy — that’s no linguistic accident!

Clover

Clover 2

To learn more about the history of how we surround our houses with lifeless lawns, I highly encourage you to read the excellent article entitled “Turf War“, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, published exactly a year ago in The New Yorker magazine.

OUR INQUIRY INTO the legacy of landscaping begins in Venezia. Today, Venice is a small city in northern Italy that is world-famous for piazzas, canals, gondolas, and, uh, blinds. New York Times writer Luigi Barzini called it “undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man” (although being Italian himself, he was slightly biased). But back in the day, Venice was an independent city-state; at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, Venice was also the most moneyed city in all of Europe. The navies of Venice protected the richest merchants on the Mediterranean, and the exploits of its native son Marco Polo confirmed its important role as gateway to the Eastern trade routes to Arabia, Persia, India and China.

BECAUSE VENICE WAS at the crossroads of international commerce, both overland and maritime, it was also a nexus for the exchange of information, and as a consequence, a chrysalis of culture. Textual and graphical art forms flourished in Venice: in the late 1400s, it was the printing capital of the world, and the painting capital, as well. Here they pioneered the paperback as a printing medium, and the canvas as a painting medium. At this time, the most affluent families of Venice competed with one another to financially support the most talented artists. One of these, a peer to Leonardo DaVinci, was Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, known colloquially as Giorgone (i.e. Big George). And Giorgione is most famous for rendering what is considered to be the very first “landscape” painting in the Western tradition: The Tempest.

Giorgione "Tempest"

Giorgione "Pastoral Concert"

Giorgione "Sleeping Venus"

GIORGIONE AND DOZENS of others that followed in the centuries to come, like Claude Lorraine and Jean-Antoine Watteau, painted in a style that would be called ‘pastoral’. The hallmarks of this painting style are the idealization of the pastoral lifestyle of the past, of shepherds and their flocks, frolicking in the fields. By this point, the Roman Empire had been in decline for a millennium, and the Italian towns were replete with architectural ruins. So picturesque by pastoral standards meant lush landscapes of rolling hills and groves of trees reasserting themselves in the foreground, pushing architectural elements into the background. And since goats graze on grasses for food, reducing them to fibrous green carpets, the images included closely-cropped meadows as important components in the perfect picture.

Lorrain "Apollo and the Muses on Mont Helion"

Lorrain "Landscape with Apollo and Mercury"

IN THE NEXT CENTURY, Portuguese explorers managed to sail around the African continent and reach India and the Far East by themselves. This meant that Venice’s capacity as a hub of commerce and culture tapered off. But the harkening back to romantic notions of our pre-agricultural past, as codified in the Venetian countryside, were permanently inscribed in the minds of artists on the continent. Two hundred years later, a group of English landscape designers would be inspired by these pastoral paintings, and invent a new style of estate garden that would lay the foundations for what would one day become the dominant paradigm for landscaping lawns in the British colonies and beyond.

NEXT:  Clover and Over Again

Watteau "Embarkation for Cythera"