The grass may no longer be greener in the other fellow's yard

I spent the first 6.5 years of my life in a flat in my grandmother's three-family.

Nanny's house didn't have much of a lawn. The front "lawn" was a steep bank that dropped off from the front porch down to a three-foot concrete retaining wall. Some sort of grassy clumps grew there, which my father or my Uncle Charlie cut with a scythe. 

The side lawn was a narrow row that sloped down to the driveway. There was a cement walk separating the side lawn from the garden that edged the house. There, Nanny grew irises and peonies, lilacs. The side lawn was anchored at one end by a giant bridal wreathe bush, and on the other end a big shaggy fir tree we used to play under. The grass wasn't much. Pretty scratchy when we ran through it barefoot when we were playing in our little kiddie pool.

The back yard was cool and dark. No grass that I recall, just a lot of moss, loamy areas, and big flat rocks. There was a birdbath and a couple of metal lawn chairs. Sometimes we sat out back, but mostly if we were sitting out, it was on the first or second floor piazza (Worcester for the porches on three-deckers).

The summer I was 6.5, we moved to a single family house on the next block. And suddenly we had lawns - front and back. 

The front lawn became my father's pride and joy. There were a few shade trees, a flagstone walk, and bushes rimming the house. But the front yard grass...It was lush, green, velvety. There were special rules for how and when it was watered, using a flat soaker hose with holes in it. Walking on it barefoot was like walking on the softest carpet imaginable. Not that we walked on it all that often. It was a showplace, not a utility space. Even in a droughty summer, the front lawn always looked like a million bucks.

Every evening in the spring and summer, my father patrolled the front lawn, screwdriver in hand, examining the grass looking for a weed, a poke of crab grass, a dandelion. Out! Out by the roots!

The back yard was far larger. It was grassy - and my father made sure that none of the grass was crab grass, and that it was dandelion free - but it was not as soft and green as the front lawn. Back yard was where we hung out, where we ran through the sprinkler, where we played badminton, where we ran around like crazy, where we lounged under a tree playing Monopoly, where we sat out on a summer evening, where we had the swing set, the kiddie pool, where my father grilled, where the lawn chairs were. And it's where sat the garbage can and the trash can where trash was burned - trash that wasn't garbage, or cans picked up by the can-man, or papers and magazines picked up by the Boy Scouts for their paper drives.

Our cellar held plenty of lawn equipment. Hand mower for the front lawn. Power mower for out back. A Scott seed and fertilizer spreader. A Scott lawn roller, basically a large metal cylinder that you filled with water and then pushed over the newly-seeded and fertilized lawn. Rakes - garden and thatch. Garden tools. And, in the winter, the back yard hose (yards of it, with sections attached via couplers to make sure it could reach all of the yard), the front yard hose, and the sprinkler. Fifty-pound sacks of grass seed and fertilizer.

My father might have been more obsessive than most about his glorious, meticulously tended front lawn. But pretty much everyone with a house had a lawn that they kept up, kept green, regularly mowed. There was one lawn on our street that was unkempt and scraggly. Other than that:  nice lawns were everywhere. Lawns were beautiful. Lawns were green. Men were judged by the condition of their lawns.

But these days, lawns are increasingly viewed as a drag on precious resources, a waste of time and money, a burden on our increasingly fragile environment. 

Lawns are heading out. Au naturel is heading in. 

It's not going to happen overnight.

We are still, largely, lawn people. The biggest crop, by area, in the United States? Not corn, or soybean, but lawn. Unproductive, ornamental lawn: around 40 million acres of it, or 2 percent of the land area of the Lower 48, according to multiple estimates cited by Garik Gutman, program manager for NASA’s Land-Cover/Land-Use Change Program.

Forty million acres: The entire state of Georgia couldn’t contain America’s total lawnage. And we pour 9 billion gallons of water on landscaping every day, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. (Source: The Washington Post)

Still, out west, where there's little water and lots of drought, folks are increasingly unturfing their yards and replacing them with native plantings and rocks. 

Yards without grass look fine. My sister has a home in Tucson. The desert. Where there aren't many lawns. The cacti and other native plants look fine. But they're not as pleasing to this New England eye as a nice green lawn, with a charming flagstone path, edged with impatiens. 

But even in the Northeast, folks are replacing their nice green lawns with landscaping that isn't going to ruin the environment and suck the aquifer dry.

Admittedly, getting rid of lawns will be a hard row to hoe, metaphorically speaking.

Lawns, of course, are part of your life. You throw a football on them, you picnic on them, you lean and loaf on them. Some years ago Dave Marciniak penned a polite defense of lawns on his landscape company’s blog: “Why the anti-lawn movement bugs me a little.” Turf serves a purpose, he wrote. It’s soft and durable for recreation. It provides visual relief for the eye, and contrast for landscaping.

Marciniak welcomes changing landscaping tastes, but notes that they are changing slowly.

“As much as Americans like to call themselves rugged individuals, there’s a lot of looking around to see what other people are doing,” says Marciniak, who lives in Culpeper, Va. “I explain to people advocating anti-lawn: Look, it’s not going to happen overnight. If you want to get people away from lawns, we have to show them it can be beautiful, it can be desirable.”

Anyone who was a kiddo in the Boston TV metro during the 1950's and 1960's will recall one of the daily ditties sung by kiddie show host Big Brother Bob Emery, who strummed along on his ukulele:

Oh, the grass is always greener in the other fellow's yard.
The little row, that we have to hoe, oh boy that's hard!
But if we all could wear green glasses, now, it wouldn't be so hard
To see how green the grass is in our own back yard.

Look like we might be needing those green glasses, 'cause someday soon, there may not be all that many nice green grassy lawns out there. 

This is, of course, the right thing to do. Still, I'm hoping that we still get to keep my front yard.

The Boston Public Garden. Right outside my front door. I'm a member of the Friends of the Public Garden. I'll have to check in with them and see if they're got something environmentally responsible up their sleeve here. 

I walk there almost every day. I don't go barefoot on the grass Even if I were so inclined, there are goose poop landmines throughout. But I like to imagine it's as soft and velvety as my father's pride and joy front lawn.