During drives around the area, one is treated to the view of various lawns. One of the details that is seen is the range of conditions on display. Some lawns are rather unkempt; others are meticulous. The latter condition obviously requires a lot of hard work and dedication. What strikes me as ironic is this level of effort versus the origins of keeping mowed lawns.
Why do people favor the look of a mowed lawn? It has to do with evoking the close-cropped look of a grazed pasture. As a pasture manager, I struggle with the misperception that I suppose has led to this idea. To me, a close-cropped pasture is a sign that our animals have exhausted the available forage in an area and need to be moved to another location. This is usually not a problem, since our method of pasture management is rotational grazing. Once a parcel is adequately grazed, we move the fence to provide a new area for them, simultaneously closing off the grazed area to allow it to regrow. The fences on the perimeter of our fields are permanent, but the interior is rather easily divided up by moving temporary fencing to isolate one section from another.
An internet site on the subject says this: “The word ‘lawn’ comes from a 15th-century English word, laune, which, in turn, is derived from the 13th-century launde, which itself comes from the old French word lande. It basically means a glade, or open space in a forest or woods. A clearing, or barren area of land. It was on this area of land that farmers would graze their livestock in the Middle Ages.” (https://yardthyme.com/lawn-care/history-of-lawns/)
The look of a close-cropped area of grazing land came to represent prosperity to our cultural ancestors. The English nobility would maintain that look in front of their estates either by active grazing or by scything. The colonial American upper class imitated their British counterparts. The American middle class wished to imitate their superiors and the invention of a mechanical lawn mower by Edwin Beard Budding in 1830 made that task easier as the Victorian age ushered in a burgeoning middle class. All was done in the spirit of giving off an air of prosperous well-being.
We have about 7 acres of dedicated grazing land. Even with rotating the areas being grazed, if the conditions are not ideal, all of it can come to be closely cropped with nowhere left for moving the animals to, except some of the adjoining hayfields. That means sacrificing some of our winter forage for them, a deficit we’ll be forced to make up by buying from another farm. Our land is quite sandy. In the type of dry conditions we are experiencing, the grass just can’t keep up with producing sufficient growth for our livestock. A truly prosperous condition would be a mix of already grazed land and lush, neighboring, as-yet ungrazed areas available for maintaining a sustainable rotation between them. This mimics the conditions of an undomesticated past when herds of grazing animals moved across open grassland freely.
How close-cropping came to be a sign of affluence mystifies me. I suppose it meant a large number of animals were consigned for slaughter since the land they lived on could no longer support them. A visible payoff was soon to come for the owners of those animals. The observers of that, who didn’t know any better, interpreted that as a sign of prosperity. It might be something like coming to the same conclusion after seeing a scratch ticket-aholic getting a hefty reward without knowing they’d blown a month’s worth of income to win back only a fraction of it. Neither jackpot is truly sustainable. That’s my best guess as to how the connection between the two might have developed.
At any rate, our pastures right now would be the envy of the most meticulous, lawn-mowing obsessed homeowner. I suppose if I had enough sprinklers, I could bring all 7 acres back into a green, growing, grass-waving condition that would be sufficient for the needs of our animals, but who waters their pastures, and is it even practical to imagine doing so? All I can do is pray for rain and wait and marvel at the paradox that this could ever have been originally taken as a sign of prosperity.
Philip Lussier is a retired educator who lives in Ashfield.