Someone had to invent the lawn. Certainly indigenous people had better things to invent and hybridize - corn, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, and so on. We have much to thank them for in our current food crops.
Lawns? They are a creation of a "sea of green." - mostly a visual aesthetic - also a surface for sports. The term lawn started to appear in the 16th century. And what does the original word mean? It means heath, barren land, or clearing. Exactly.
We can guess it is the aristocracy that made lawns popular - this was particularly the case in England where that damp climate made lawn-growing easily possible. For our perfect lawns of today, we have to skip to the Palace of Versailles where André Le Nôtre designed the gardens and included a small area of grass called the tapas vert - "green carpet".
And then the lawnmower! What they did before to achieve the "green carpet" seems tortuous.
Somehow, over time, the greatest lover of lawns is the United States, according to a Scientific American article. "Americans have taken their landscape aesthetic around the world. American communities in Saudi Arabia have lawns in the middle of the desert. American embassies and consulates around the world have lawns. And when the Cultural Revolution swept through China, any lawns that had been established under American and British influence were pulled out. Lawns are American..."
The most famous lawns in the world? - Buckingham Palace
- Chateau de Versailes
- The White House
- Champ de Mars
- Wimbledon Centre Court
- Lord's Cricket Ground
and finally,
Windows XP wallpaper "Yes, this is a real place, and it’s located in Sonoma County in California. National Geographic photographer Charles O’Rear snapped it on his way home before submitting it as a stock photo. Called Bliss, it’s probably graced the insides of more than one billion PCs across the world. Don’t worry Miimo, you can’t catch the blue screen of death from eating the grass."
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