Land Matters

The American lawn is a design anachronism and an ecological liability—yet somehow lawns continue to roll out unabated across America’s sprawling suburbs. Are there no options out there that the American family will accept? Architect/artist Fritz Haeg has come up with one wonderfully subversive answer to that question: Instead of mowing your front yard, eat it. Part polemic—“the case against lawns”—and part practical proposal, Haeg’s notion has evolved into a handsomely designed book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (New York: Metropolis Press, 2008). Forgive me, reader, but my first thought when I picked up the book was: Why did it take an architect/artist to conceive this landscape project? Why aren’t landscape architects initiating—and publishing—stuff like this?

Haeg’s project began on Independence Day 2005, when a suburban home owner in Salina, Kansas, signed on with the initiative, ripped out his lawn, and planted the first regional prototype garden. This was followed by other regional prototypes in Lakewood, California, and Maplewood, New Jersey, and one in England (Riprap, October 2007). In the New Jersey prototype, shown on this page, the home owners rototilled their lawn into oblivion and planted climbing cucumbers, two kinds of lettuce, tomatoes, several varieties of peppers, bok choy, and herbs. Other prototypes are planned in cities across the United States; Haeg is currently working on one in Austin, Texas.

There are other alternatives to the lawn, of course—miniature prairies and meadows, for example—and I suspect LAM readers have tried some of them. Forward-thinking landscape architects in general favor alternatives to the lawn. As Diana Balmori, ASLA, writes in her introduction to Edible Estates: “Our ecological knowledge demands that we give up the lawn. This icon is no longer viable.”

Trouble is, tens of millions of suburbanites don’t agree with Balmori. Haeg’s converts may think they’re doing the right thing with their prototypes, but realistically, how many home owners are going to follow their example? For that matter, won’t the neighbors of the edible estates squawk when the veggies look withered and sere at the end of summer? I seem to recall that somewhere, an ecology-minded home owner who replanted his yard as a native meadow was hauled into court by his home owners’ association. With those kinds of disincentives to change, how can we break the stranglehold of the American lawn?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor / bthompson@asla.org