Homeowners who are less than fanatical or even a little lazy about tending their lawns can take comfort from a quietly engaging exhibit at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum that says it’s a good sign if your grass is mixed with dandelions and clover.
“If you see dandelions, it’s a sign of a healthy yard,” projects manager Shane DuBow said Wednesday at a press preview of the new exhibit, speaking pure heresy in the minds of more meticulous grass groomers.
Curators of “Lawn Nation: The Art & Science of the American Lawn” have even dubbed the grass-dandelion-clover mix the “Freedom Lawn” because it needs little water, no chemicals and minimal care beyond mowing. It is now, in fact, the standard lawn in Chicago parks.
The exhibit uses a mix of videos, interactive displays and about 30 specially commissioned works by artists, photographers and scientists that ponder the American love affair with lawns. The result is a combination of whimsy and serious concern over what that obsession has meant to the environment.
Carefully manicured turf lawns that spread gracefully in front of single-family homes are pretty much an American thing, not much seen elsewhere in the world.
“The idea of lawns seems to have started with the meadows that surrounded grand estates in England, kept closely cropped by herds of sheep,” said Jill Riddell, the museum’s vice president of exhibits.
Among the first well-to-do Americans to emulate that look was George Washington, who Riddell said hired an English gardener to landscape Mt. Vernon. Most 18th and 19th Century American homeowners used their yards primarily as vegetable and flower gardens.
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When American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted laid out the Chicago suburb of Riverside as one of the nation’s first planned communities in 1869, he surrounded houses with lawns as though “they were set in a common meadow,” Riddell said. “It was an egalitarian idea to build a sense of community by everybody’s home surroundings having the same look.”
The lawn gained popularity after Olmsted used it for landscaping the 1893 Columbian Exposition world’s fair. At the same time, the newly invented push mower helped keep those new lawns — largely a mix of grass, clover and dandelions — neatly trimmed.
“Our obsession that lawns have to be all grass was congruent with technology that evolved in World War II,” Riddell said. “Herbicides were invented that killed weeds; small gasoline engines were developed that could power things like power mowers, chain saws and leaf blowers.
“At the same time, people quit renting and bought homes out in the suburbs, where everybody had their own yard, and started planting grass.”
Today, if all the lawns in the U.S. were laid out together in one place, they would cover 40 million acres, enough to carpet the state of Kentucky. Turf grass is the largest irrigated crop in the country, covering three times the acreage of the next closest, corn.
To keep out “weeds” such as clover and dandelions, homeowners pour three times more pesticides per acre than industrial farmers use, contributing to water contamination. Sources cited in the exhibit point out that a gas-powered leaf blower emits the same amount of hydrocarbons in a half-hour as a car driven from Maine to California and back at 30 m.p.h.
While lawns might seem natural, none of the turf grasses used here is native to the U.S.; even Kentucky bluegrass is from Europe.
The museum offers a tip sheet on some alternatives, suggesting how people can landscape their yards while using less water, chemicals and gasoline — particularly by planting larger flower gardens using native plants and other options.
To demonstrate, the museum has installed four alternative lawns in its own front yard.
“I think the message is that a lawn is just one choice that people can make about what to have for a yard, that there are other possibilities that are attractive and often far less demanding and damaging to the environment,” Riddell said.
“Lawn Nation” is the first temporary exhibit the museum has designed and mounted on its own, she said.
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If you go
What: “Lawn Nation: The Art & Science of the American Lawn”
Where: Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon Drive, Chicago
When: Opens Saturday, runs through Sept. 7
Cost: Free with general admission, which is $9 for adults, $7 for seniors and students, and $6 for children ages 3-12
Details: 773-755-5100 or www.chias.org
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