Beyond Wilderness and Lawn

On DesignMY S U B J E C T I S T H E F U T U R E of thegarden in America. My conviction is thatgardening, as a cultural activity, mattersdeeply, not only to the look of our land-scape, but also to the wisdom of ourthinking about the environment.

When I speak of the future of gardensI have two things in mind: literal dirt-and-plant gardens, of course, but alsothe garden as a metaphor or paradigm,as a way of thinking about nature thatmight help us move beyond the either/orthinking that has historically governedthe American approach to the landscape:civilization versus wilderness, cultureversus nature, the city versus the coun-try. These oppositions have been partic-ularly fierce and counterproductive inthis country, and deserve much of theblame for the bankruptcy of our currentapproach to the environment.

One fact about our culture can framemy argument: the two most importantcontributions America has made to theworld history of landscape are the frontlawn and the wilderness preserve. Whatcan one say about such a culture? Oneconclusion would be that its thinking onthe subject of nature is schizophrenic,that this is a culture that cannot decidewhether to dominate nature in the nameof civilization, or to worship it, un-touched, as a means of escape from civi-lization. More than a century has passedsince America invented the front lawnand the wilderness park, yet these twovery different and equally original insti-tutions continue to shape and reflect

American thinking about both natureand the garden. I would argue that wecannot address the future of gardeningin America—and the future of the largerAmerican landscape—until we havecome to terms with (and gotten over) thelawn, on the one side, and the wilder-ness, on the other.

As the unlikely coexistence of thesetwo contradictory ideas suggests, wetend reflexively to assume that natureand culture are intrinsically opposed, en-gaged in a kind of zero-sum game inwhich the gain of one entails the loss ofthe other. Certainly the American land-scape that we’ve created reflects such di-chotomous thinking: some eight percentof the nation’s land has been designatedas wilderness, while the remaining nine-ty-two percent has been deeded uncon-ditionally to civilization—to thehighway, the commercial strip, the sub-urban development, the parking lot, and,of course, the lawn. The idea of a “mid-dle landscape”—of a place partakingequally of nature and culture, striking acompromise or balance between thetwo—has received too little attention,with the result that the garden in Ameri-ca has yet to come into its own.

This assertion might seem unfairlydismissive. Certainly there are manybeautiful gardens in America, and manygardeners who garden well and seriously.But would anyone argue that Americangarden design can match, in scope orachievement, American music or paint-ing or literature or even—to name one

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Beyond Wilderness and LawnMichael Pollan

of our newer arts—American cooking?Of course, even to draw such a compari-son will probably strike some as absurd,since our culture does not generally re-gard gardening as an art form at all. His-torically, American gardens have beenmore utilitarian than aesthetic or sensu-al. As a result, the United States, whichin this century has made large contribu-tions to virtually all of the arts, has pro-duced very few landscape designers whocan claim international reputations. Al-most the only American landscape artistsknown internationally are golf coursedesigners, whose talents are in great de-mand worldwide. Given our infatuationwith the lawn, this isn’t too surprising.But why isn’t there a single Americangarden designer with the internationalrenown of a Robert Trent Jones?

Whether the wilderness ideal or theconvention of the front lawn is more toblame for this situation is debatable. Butone indisputable fact strikes me as par-ticularly significant: the lawn and thewilderness were “invented” during thesame historical moment, in the decadeafter the civil war, around 1870. Thissuggests that these two very differentconcepts of landscape cannot only coex-ist but may even be interdependent. Infact, the wilderness lover and the lawnlover probably have more in commonwith one another than with the Ameri-can gardener. But before addressing theprospects for the American gardener, Iwant briefly to address the history of histwo adversaries.

WILDERNESSOn March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S.Grant signed the act that designatedmore than two million acres in north-western Wyoming as Yellowstone Na-tional Park; thus was created the world’sfirst great wilderness preserve. Grantwas responding to a brilliant campaignon behalf of wilderness preservationwaged by (among many others) HenryDavid Thoreau and Frederick LawOlmsted. Why should the peculiar ideaof preserving wilderness arise at thistime? Clearly, it owed to the fact that thewilderness was disappearing; as early as1850 visionary Americans began to real-

ize that the frontier was not limitless,and that, unless action were taken, nowilderness would be left to protect.America grew rapidly in the period fol-lowing the Civil War—and so too didthe movement to preserve at least a por-tion of the fast-receding western wilder-ness. It’s remarkable how quickly themovement developed, given that half acentury earlier the wilderness had beendemonized as worthless, heathen, unre-generate—the haunt of Satan. Of course,the appreciation of wild nature was aninvention of the late 18th century, of theRomantics—and more specifically, aninvention of people who lived in cities.The urbanization of America in the sec-ond half of the 19th century formed theessential, indispensable context for thecreation of the wilderness park—a goodexample of the mutual interdependenceof civilization and wilderness.

From a philosophical perspective, theromance of “undisturbed” land has donemuch to keep American gardens fromattaining the distinction and status of theother arts in this country. Our apprecia-tion of wild land was not, as in the caseof the English, primarily aesthetic—itwas imbued with moral and spiritual val-ues. The New England Transcendental-ists regarded the untouched Americanlandscape as sacred. Nature, to RalphWaldo Emerson and his followers, wasthe outward symbol of spirit. To alter sospiritual a place, even to garden it, isproblematic, verges, in fact, on sacrilege.For how could one presume to improveon what God had made? Emerson him-self was an accomplished gardener, butgardening rarely figured in his publishedwriting. This was, I suspect, because hecould not reconcile his sense of the sa-credness of untouched land with the gar-dener’s faith that the landscape can beimproved by cultivation. I’m convincedthis unresolved conflict forced him intoa bit of intellectual dishonesty. It wasEmerson who tried to pass off the trulydangerous idea—at least from the gar-dener’s point of view—that there is nosuch thing as a weed. A weed, he wrote,is simply a plant whose virtues have yetto be discovered. “Weed,” in otherwords, is not a category of nature, but a

defect of our perception.Thoreau brought this idea with him

to Walden, where it got him into practi-cal and philosophical trouble. As part ofhis experiment in self-sufficiency,Thoreau planted a cash crops of beans.In general, as observer and naturalist,Thoreau refused to make what he called“invidious distinctions” between differ-ent orders of nature—it was all equallywonderful in his eyes, the pond, themud, even the bugs. But when Thoreaudetermines to “make the earth say beansinstead of grass”—that is, when he be-gins to garden—he finds that for thefirst time he has made enemies in nature:the worms, the morning dew, wood-chucks, and, of course, weeds. Thoreaudescribes waging a long and decidedlyuncharacteristic “war . . . with weeds,those Trojans who had sun and rain anddew on their side. Daily the beans sawme come to their rescue armed with ahoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies,filling trenches with weedy dead.” Henow finds himself making “invidious dis-tinctions with his hoe, leveling wholeranks of one species, and sedulously cul-tivating another.”1

But weeding and warring with pestswrack Thoreau with guilt, and by theend of the bean field chapter he can’ttake it any more. He trudges back to theEmersonian fold, renewing his uncriticalworship of the wild. “The sun looks onour cultivated fields and on the prairiesand forests without distinction,” he de-clares. “Do not these beans grow thewoodchucks too? How then can our har-vest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at theabundance of the weeds whose seeds arethe granaries of the birds?” Unable tosquare his gardening with his love of na-ture, Thoreau gives up entirely on thegarden—an act with unfortunate conse-quences not just for the American gar-den but for American culture in general.Thoreau went on to declare that he’drather live hard by the most dismalswamp than the most beautiful garden.And with that somewhat obnoxious dec-laration, the garden was effectively ban-ished from American literature.

The irony is that Thoreau was wrongto assume his weeds were more natural

On Design Beyond Wilderness and Lawn

2 H A R V A R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E W I N T E R / S P R I N G 1 9 9 8

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or wild than his beans. Apparently hewasn’t aware that many of the weeds henames and praises as native actuallycame from England with the white man;they were as much the product of humanintervention in nature as his beans were.Far from being a symbol of wildness,weeds are, in fact, plants that haveevolved to take advantage of peoples’disturbance of the soil. One of the casu-alties of our romance of wildness is acertain blindness: we no longer see the

landscape accurately, no longer perceiveall the changes we’ve made (not all ofwhich are negative). All too often whenwe admire a landscape we assume it’snatural—God’s work, not man’s. ManyNew Yorkers, perhaps most, have noidea that Central Park is a garden: a de-signed, man-made landscape. Even peo-ple who know about Olmsted andrecognize his genius tend to suspendtheir disbelief and experience the placeas “natural,” seeking in Central Park thesatisfactions of Nature rather than ofArt. Historically Americans have tendedto experience the great park less as an el-ement of the city, something specific tourban life, than as a temporary, dreamyescape from urban life, an antidote tothe city. We can see how even our urbanpark tradition is founded on the in-evitable antagonism of nature and cul-ture, rather than on an attempt to marrythe two.

Any culture whose literature takes forgranted the moral superiority of wilder-ness will find it hard to make great gar-dens. Its energy will be devoted to savingwilderness rather than to making andpreserving landscapes. For the same rea-son, Americans are reluctant to aestheti-cize nature, to draw distinctions betweenone plant and another, to proudly leaveour mark on the land. And when we domake gardens, we tend to favor gardensthat are “wild” or “natural”—but “thewild garden” and “the natural garden”

strike me as oxymorons.A natural or wild garden is one de-

signed to look as though it were not de-signed. Whether a wildflower meadow, abog, or a forest, such gardens are typi-cally planted exclusively with nativespecies and designed to banish any markof human artifice; sometimes they’recalled “habitat gardens” or, more grand-ly, the New American Garden (thoughthey are neither New nor American).

There’s a strong whiff of moralism

behind this movement, not to mention adisturbing streak of anti-humanist senti-ment. Ken Druse, perhaps the leadingpopular exponent of the school today,makes clear that the aim of the naturalgarden is not to please people. “It’s nolonger good enough to make it pretty,”he writes; the goal is to “serve the plan-et.”2 Obviously, the natural gardenershave not rethought the historic Ameri-can opposition between culture and na-ture—between the lawn and whatbecomes, in their designs, a pseudo-wilderness. They assume we mustchoose between “making it pretty” and“serving the planet”—between humandesire and the needs of nature. I proposethat the word “garden” instead be re-served for places that mediate betweennature and culture rather than force usto make a choice that is not only impos-sible but false.

Natural gardeners seem convincedthat human artifice in the garden is actu-ally offensive to nature. This is an exceed-ingly peculiar notion. A few years ago, Ipublished an article detailing my first at-tempt to plant a natural garden. It was adisaster: the weeds quickly triumphed,and the wildflower meadow I envisionedsoon degenerated into a close approxi-mation of a vacant lot. I concluded thearticle with some fairly banal observa-tions about the benefits of planting an-nuals in rows. Weeding is made easier, ofcourse, but I also found some elemental

satisfaction in making a straight line innature. I quickly discovered that straightlines in the garden have become contro-versial in this country. In one of severalletters to the editor, a landscape designerfrom Massachusetts charged that byplanting in rows I was behaving “irre-sponsibly.” By promoting even this smalldegree of horticultural formalism, thiscritic argued, I was contributing to thedegradation of the environment, sincegardening “according to existing aes-thetic conventions” relied excessively onfertilizers and herbicides. “Nature ab-hors a straight line,” my correspondentclaimed, quoting William Kent, thegreat 18th-century English landscapedesigner.

Natural gardeners have a point inso-far as they advocate organic methods.But the formal garden is not inherentlyless environmentally responsible than aso-called natural garden. A “wild” gar-den is not intrinsically healthier, or morepreferable to nature, than a well-tendedparterre. A garden’s ecological sound-ness depends solely on the gardener’smethods, not on his aesthetics.

Speculation about what nature doesand does not like has inhibited Ameri-cans from learning about form in gar-den, which seems to me a prerequisite tomaking good ones. Indeed, at its mostessential level, gardening is a process ofgiving form to nature, an activity neitherinherently good nor bad; history showsit can be done well, or badly. The formswe use in shaping our land can be subtle,even imperceptible, though I suspectthat most of us will fare better withstrongly articulated forms—it takes thegenius of an Olmsted or a Jens Jensen tomake a satisfying garden with less. Mostof us who try to create “free-form” gar-dens make slack, uncompelling spaces.Straight lines are one of the gardenersgreat tools, and I am convinced that na-ture couldn’t care less whether gardenersplant their annuals in straight lines ormeandering drifts.

LAWNThe romance of wilderness is a quintes-sential American sentiment, but it is oneindulged primarily in books or on vaca-



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We cannot address the future of gardening in America—andthe future of the larger American landscape—until we havecome to terms with (and gotten over) the lawn, on the oneside, and the wilderness, on the other.

tion. The rest of the time, we tend to actin accordance with a very different ideaof nature: the idea that the land is oursto dominate, whether in the name ofGod, during the nation’s early days, orlater, in the name of Progress. It is as-tonishing that one culture could givebirth to two such antagonistic strains—to both the worship of wilderness andthe worship of progress, which usuallyentails the domination of wilderness.This latter notion, more manifest in theactual landscape than in our writingsabout it, has been as deleterious to themaking of good gardens as has been thewilderness idea. It is far more likely togive us parking lots and shopping cen-ters . . . and lawns.

Anyone who has ever mowed a lawncan appreciate the undeniable pleasureof bringing a heedless landscape undercontrol, however temporarily. But this isnot, except perhaps in America, the samething as gardening. For when we readthat gardening is “the number oneleisure activity” in this country, we needto remember that the statistics accom-modate all those people for whom “gar-dening” consists exclusively of thepushing, or often driving, of an internalcombustion engine over a monocultureof imported grass species.

The ideology of lawns cannot be re-duced to the drive to dominate nature,though certainly that is one element ofit. The love of closely cropped grass maywell be universal, as Thorstein Veblenspeculated in The Theory of the LeisureClass3; it is a reminder of our pastoralroots, and perhaps also of our evolution-ary origins on the grassy savannas ofEast Africa. America’s unique contribu-tion to humankind’s ancient love of grasshas been, specifically, the large, unfencedpatches of lawn in front of our houses—the decidedly odd custom, to quote oneauthority, “of uniting the front lawns ofhowever many houses there may be onboth sides of a street to present an un-troubled aspect of expansive green to thepasserby.”4 This definition was set forthby the historian Ann Leighton, whoconcluded after a career spent studyingthe history of American gardens that thefront lawn was our principal contribu-

tion to world garden design. How de-pressing.

The same rapid post-Civil Wargrowth that made wilderness preserva-tion seem imperative also gave us the in-stitution of the front lawn, the birth ofwhich, as near as I can determine, shouldbe dated on or about 1870. At that timeseveral developments—some social andeconomic, others technological—com-bined to make the spread of front lawnspossible.

First was the movement to the sub-urbs, then called “borderlands.” Before1870, anyone who lived beyond the citywas a farmer, and the yards of farmerswere strictly utilitarian. According to theaccounts of many visitors from abroad,yards in America prior to 1870 were, toput it bluntly, a mess. The belief that theAmerican landscape has declined andfallen from some pre-industrial pastoralideal is, in fact, false; the 19th-centuryrural homestead was a ramshackle affair.Americans rarely gardened, at least or-namentally. The writer William Cob-bett, visiting from England, wasastonished by the “out-of-door slovenli-ness” of these homesteads. Each farmer,he wrote, “was content with his shell ofboards, while all around him is as barrenas the sea beach . . . [even] though thereis no English shrub, or flower, whichwill not grow and flourish here.”5

All that begins to change with the mi-gration to the borderlands. For the firsttime urban, cosmopolitan people werechoosing to live outside of town and tocommute, by way of the commuter rail-road system then being built. Theirhomes, also for the first time, are homesin the modern sense: centers of familylife from which commerce—and agricul-ture—have been excluded. These homesare refuges from urban life, which by thelate 19th century was acquiring a reputa-tion for danger and immorality. Therapidly expanding middle class was com-ing to believe that a freestanding housesurrounded by a patch of land, allowingyou to keep one foot in the city and theother in the countryside, was the bestway to live.

But how should this new class of sub-urbanites organize their yards? No use-

ful precedents were at hand. So, as oftenhappens when a new class of affluentconsumers in need of guidance arose, aclass of confident experts arose as well,proffering timely advice. A generation oftalented landscape designers and re-formers came forward, from midcenturyon, to advise the middle class in its form-ative landscaping decisions. Most promi-nent were Frederick Law Olmsted, hispartner Calvert Vaux (a transplantedEnglishman), Andrew Jackson Downing,and Frank J. Scott, a disciple of Down-ing’s who would prove to be the Ameri-can lawn’s most brilliant propagandist.

These men were seeking the propermodel for the new American suburbanlandscape. Although they were eventual-ly to develop a distinctly American ap-proach, they began, typically, by lookingto England—specifically to the Englishpicturesque garden which, of course,featured gorgeous lawns, the kind thatonly the English seem able to grow.

Clearly, Americans did not inventlawns per se; they’d been popular inEngland for centuries. But in Englandlawns were found mainly on estates. TheAmericans set out to democratize them,cutting the vast, manorial greenswardsinto quarter-acre slices everyone couldafford. (Olmsted’s 1868 plan for River-side, outside Chicago, is a classic exam-ple of how the style of an Englishlandscape park could be adapted to anAmerican subdivision.)

The rise of the classic American frontlawn awaited three developments, all ofwhich were in place by the early 1870s:the availability of an affordable lawn-mower, the invention of barbed wire (tokeep animals out of the front yard), andthe persuasiveness of an effective propa-gandist. In 1832 a carpet manufacturerin England named Edwin Budding in-vented the lawnmower; by 1860 Ameri-can inventors had perfected it, devising alightweight mower an individual couldmanage; and by 1880 this machine wasrelatively inexpensive. Before the inven-tion in Peoria, Illinois, of barbed wire in1872, the fencing of livestock was a du-bious proposition, and the likelihoodwas great that one’s beautiful front lawnwould be trampled by a herd of livestock



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on the lam. But soon after the mass-marketing of barbed wire, municipal or-dinances were being passed penalizinganyone who let livestock wander freelythrough town.

As for the effective propagandist, theman who did most to advance the causeof the American front lawn—and thus toretard the development of the Americangarden—was Frank J. Scott, who wrote abest-selling book called The Art of Beau-tifying Suburban Home Grounds. Pub-lished in 1870, the book is an ecstaticpaean to the beauty and indispensabilityof the front lawn. “A smooth, closelyshaven surface of grass is by far the mostessential element of beauty on thegrounds of a suburban house,” Scottwrote.6 Unlike the English, who viewedlawns not as ends in themselves but asbackdrops for trees and flower beds, andas settings for lawn games, Scott subor-dinated all other elements of the land-scape to the lawn. Shrubs should beplanted right up against the house so asnot to distract from, or obstruct the viewof, the lawn (it was Scott who therebyignited the very peculiar American pas-sion for foundation planting); flowerswere permissible, but they must be re-

stricted to the periphery of the grass.“Let your lawn be your home’s velvetrobe,” he wrote, “and your flowers itsnot-too-promiscuous decoration.”7 It’sclear that his ideas about lawns owemuch to puritan attitudes that regardedpure decoration, and ornamental gar-dening, as morally suspect. Lawns fitwell with the old American preferencefor a plain style.

Scott’s most radical departure fromold-world practice was to insist upon theindividual property owner’s responsibili-ty to his neighbors. “It is unchristian,”he declared, “to hedge from the sight of

others the beauties of nature which ithas been our good fortune to create orsecure.”8 He railed against fences, whichhe regarded as selfish and undemocrat-ic—one’s lawn should contribute to thecollective landscape. Scott elevated anunassuming patch of turf grass into aninstitution of democracy. The Americanlawn becomes an egalitarian conceit, im-plying that there is no need, in Scott’swords, “to hedge a lovely garden againstthe longing eyes of the outside world”because we all occupy the same (middle)class.9

The problem here, in my view, is notwith the aspirations behind the frontlawn. In theory at least, the front lawn isan admirable institution, a noble expres-sion of our sense of community andequality. With our open-faced frontlawns, we declare our like-mindedness toour neighbors. And, in fact, lawns areone of the minor institutions of ourdemocracy, symbolizing as they do thecommon landscape that forms the na-tion. Since there can be no fences break-ing up this common landscape,maintenance of the lawn becomes noth-ing less than a civic obligation. (Indeed,the failure to maintain one’s portion of

the national lawn—for that is what itis—is in many communities punishableby fine.) Our lawns exist to unite us. Itmakes sense, too, that in a countrywhose people are unified by no singlerace or ethnic background or religion,the land itself—our one great commondenominator—should emerge as a cru-cial vehicle of consensus. And so across acontinent of almost unimaginable geo-graphic variety, from the glacial terrainof Maine to the desert of Southern Cali-fornia, we have rolled out a single emer-ald carpet of lawn.

A noble project, perhaps, but one ul-

timately at cross purposes with the ideaof a garden. Indeed, the custom of thefront lawn has done even more than thewilderness ideal to retard the develop-ment of gardening in America. For onething, we have little trouble ignoring thewilderness ideal whenever it suits us; ig-noring the convention of the front lawnis much harder, as anyone who has everneglected mowing for a few weeks wellknows. In fact it’s doubtful that thepromise of the American garden will berealized as long as the lawn continues torule our yards and minds.

It’s important to note that it is notgrass per se that is inimical to gardens;indeed, some patch of lawn is essentialto many kinds of gardens—the Englishlandscape garden is unimaginable with-out its great passages of lawn. The prob-lem is specifically the unfenced frontlawns, and that problem has both a prac-tical and theoretical dimension.

In practical terms, by ceding ourfront yards to lawn, we relinquish mostof the acreage available to our gardens.Indeed, this space has effectively beencondemned by eminent domain, handedover to the community. In fact, whenasked, most people will say they regardtheir front lawns as belonging to thecommunity, while their backyards be-long exclusively to themselves.

Because front-lawn convention callsfor the elimination of fences, we haverendered all this land unfit for anythingbut exhibition. Our front yards are sim-ply too public a place to spend time in.Americans rarely venture into their frontyards except to maintain them. As oneAmerican landscape designer noted, inthe 1920s, our lawns are designed for“the admiration of the street.”10 Butconsider how novel an idea this is:throughout history gardens have usuallybeen thought of as enclosed places—thisconcept is embedded in the word’s ety-mology. And while great unenclosedgardens (such as Versailles, and the Eng-lish landscape gardens) have been creat-ed, these have invariably been so vast inscale that privacy was not an issue. Ourlawns might descend from the Englishpicturesque tradition, in which the mak-ing of unimpeded views took precedence



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It makes sense that in a country whose people are unified by no single race or ethnic background or religion, the land itselfshould emerge as a crucial vehicle of consensus. And so acrossa continent of almost unimaginable geographic variety, from theglacial terrain of Maine to the desert of Southern California, wehave rolled out a single emerald carpet of lawn.

over the creating of habitable space, buton the scale of suburban development, a“prospect” is not possible without de-stroying the possibility of usable individ-ual spaces—and of meaningful gardens.

From a philosophical point of view,the very idea of lawns does violence tothe fundamental principle of gardening,as expressed by Alexander Pope: “Con-sult the genius of the place in all.” Thelawn is imposed on the American land-scape with no regard for local geographyor climate or history. No true gardener,consulting the genius of the Nevadalandscape, or the Florida landscape, orthe North Dakota landscape, would everpropose putting a lawn in any of theseplaces; and yet lawns are found in all ofthese places. If gardening requires give-and-take between the gardener and apiece of land, then putting in a lawn rep-resents instead a process of conquest andobliteration, an imposition—except in avery few places—of an alien idea andeven, as it happens, of a set of alienspecies (for none of the grasses in ourlawns are native to this continent).

And last, the culture of the lawn dis-courages the very habits of mind re-quired to make good gardens. Besides asensitivity to site and willingness tocompromise with nature, the gardener,to accomplish anything powerful, mustbe able to approach the land not as a ve-hicle of social consensus (which by itsvery nature will discourage innovation)but as an arena for self-expression.

For all these reasons, it will probablytake a declaration of independence fromthe American lawn before we can expectthe American garden to flourish.

The front lawn and the wilderness idealstill divide and rule the American land-scape, and will not be easily overthrown.But American attitudes toward natureare changing, and, viewed from one per-spective at least, this leaves room forhope. One of the few things we can saywith certainty about the next five hun-dred years of American landscape histo-ry is that they will be shaped by a muchmore acute environmental conscious-ness—by a pressing awareness that thenatural world is in serious trouble, and

that serious actions are needed to save it.So how will the American garden fare inan age dominated by such an awareness?What about the wilderness ideal? Andthe front lawn?

It might seem axiomatic that, thegreater the concern for the environ-ment, the greater the regard for wilder-ness. But it is becoming clear thatattention to wilderness no longer consti-tutes a sufficient response to the crisis ofthe environment. True, there are radicalenvironmental groups, like Earth First!,which believe that salvation lies in re-drawing the borders between nature andculture—in blowing up dams and pow-erlines so that the wilderness might re-claim the land. But an environmentalismdominated by love of wilderness dates tothe era of John Muir, and while it hasdone much to protect a now-sacredeight percent of American land, it hasoffered little guidance as to how to man-age wisely the remaining ninety-twopercent, where most of us spend most ofour time.

We must continue to defend wilder-ness, but adding more land to the wilder-ness will not solve our most importantenvironmental problems. But even moreimportant, nor will an environmentalethic based on the ideal of wilderness—which is, in fact, the only one we’ve everhad in this country. About any particularpiece of land, the wilderness ethic says:leave it alone. Do nothing. Natureknows best. But this ethic says nothingabout all those places we cannot help butalter, all those places that cannot simplybe “given back to nature,” which todayare most places. It is too late in the dayto follow Thoreau back into the woods.There are too many of us, and not near-ly enough woods.

But if salvation does not lie in wilder-ness, nor is it offered by the aesthetic ofthe lawn; in fact, the lawn, as both land-scape practice and a metaphor for awhole approach to nature, may be insup-portable in a time of environmental cri-sis. Remarkably, the lawn has emerged asan environmental issue in the last fewyears. More and more Americans areasking whether the price of a perfectlawn—in terms of pesticides, water, and

energy—can any longer be justified. TheAmerican lawn may well not survive along period of environmental activism—and no other single development wouldbe more beneficial for the American gar-den. For as soon as an American decidesto rip out a lawn, he or she becomes,perforce, a gardener, someone who mustask the gardener’s questions: What isright for this place? What do I wanthere? How might I go about creating apleasing outdoor space on this site? Howcan I make use of nature here withoutabusing it?

The answers to these questions willbe as different as the people posingthem, and the places where they areposed. For as soon as people start tothink like gardeners, they begin to deviseindividual and local answers. In all likeli-hood, post-lawn America would nothave a single national style; we are tooheterogeneous a people, and our geogra-phy and climate too various, to support asingle national style. And that, after all,has been the lesson of the Americanlawn: imposing the same front yard inTampa and Bethesda and Reno and Al-bany exacts too steep an environmentalprice. Undoubtedly lawns will survive insome places (such as the cool, dampNorthwest, where the “genius” of theplace may well accommodate them) butthe American front yard will someday beentirely different things in Sausalito andWhite Plains and Fort Worth. Thosewho are intent on establishing a “NewAmerican Garden” may judge this a loss,and balk at giving up the idea of a singlenational landscape style. But as valuableas unifying national institutions may be,nature is a poor place to try to establishthem. However one may judge multicul-turalism, multi-horticulturalism is an en-vironmental necessity. The NewAmerican Garden must be plural.

But even if an age of environmental-ism doesn’t attack the lawn head on, itwould still bode well for the garden inAmerica. The decline of the lawn maybe gradual and piecemeal and even inad-vertent, as gardens gradually expand intothe territory of the lawn, one square footat a time. To put this another way: tothink environmentally is to find reasons



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to garden. Growing one’s food is thebest way to assure its purity. Compost-ing, which should be numbered amongthe acts of gardening, is an excellent wayto lighten a household’s burden on thelocal landfill. And gardens can reduceour dependence on distant sources notonly of food, but also of energy, technol-ogy, and even entertainment. If Ameri-cans still require a moral and utilitarianrationale to put hoe to ground, the nextseveral years are certain to supply plentyof unassailable, even righteous ones.

So I am optimistic about the Ameri-can garden—or at least about the prolif-eration of gardens in America. As theenvironment take its necessary and in-evitable place in our attention, the rea-sons to garden will become increasinglycompelling, and the reason to maintainlawns correspondingly less so. Whetherthere will be a flowering of great gardensin America is another question, but heretoo there is a reason to be optimistic,one that may seem at first entirely offthe point: almost overnight, Americanshave invented a distinctive and accom-plished cuisine.

Only a few years ago American cook-ing was no better than provincialBritain’s or Germany’s: unimaginative,heavy, relentlessly utilitarian. (Talk aboutthe plain style!) Our recent culinary rev-olution suggests that a corner of the cul-ture formerly neglected or disdainedmay suddenly become the focus andbeneficiary of the kind of sustained at-tention and cultural support that makesgenuine, original achievement possible.To take this analogy even further, myguess is that the same radical cosmopoli-tanism that today distinguishes Ameri-can cuisine—its willingness to drawfrom a dozen different national tradi-tions, combining them in never-before-seen combinations—will someday definethe New American Garden.

If this analogy seems far-fetched—thelawn giving way to the mixed border theway the meatloaf has given way to theshiitake mushroom and goat cheese piz-za—consider for a moment that the pre-conditions for a brilliant cuisine and abrilliant garden are so similar: both re-quire the artful intermingling of nature

and culture. “Cookery,” the poet Freder-ick Turner has written, “transforms rawnature into the substance of humancommunion, routinely and without fusstransubstantiating matter into mind.”11

Couldn’t much the same be said aboutthe making of gardens? Perhaps the oldpuritan antagonism between nature andculture is at last relaxing its hold on us.If we are finally willing to sanction themingling of these long-warring terms onour dinner plates, then why not also inour yards?

That would be very good news forthe quality of our gardens, and also, inturn, for the quality of our thinkingabout the environment. For if environ-mentalism is likely to be a boon to theAmerican garden, gardening could be aboon to environmentalism, a movementwhich, as I’ve suggested, stands in needof some new ways of thinking about na-ture. The garden is as good a place tolook as any. Gardens by themselves obvi-ously cannot right our relationship tonature, but the habits of thought theyfoster can take us a long way in that di-rection—can even suggest the linea-ments of a new environmental ethic thatmight help us in situations where thewilderness ethic is silent or unhelpful.Gardening tutors us in nature’s ways,fostering an ethic of respect for the land.Gardens instruct us in the particularitiesof place. Gardens also teach the neces-sary, if still rather un-American, lessonthat nature and culture can be recon-ciled, that it is possible to find somemiddle ground between the wildernessand the lawn—a third way into the land-scape. This, finally, is the best reason wehave to be optimistic about the garden’sprospects in America: we need the gar-den, and the garden’s ethic, too much to-day for it not to flourish.

Notes1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York:Macmillan, 1962), 117-125.2. Ken Druse, The Natural Habitat Garden (NewYork: Clarkson Potter, 1994), 9.3. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the LeisureClass (New York, Viking Press, 1967), 134.4. Ann Leighton, American Gardens of the Nine-teenth Century (Amherst, MA: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1987), 249. 5. William Cobbett, quoted in John Stilgoe,Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press,1988), 71.6. Frank J. Scott, excerpted in The AmericanGardener: A Sampler, ed. Allen Lacy (New York:Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1988), 317.7. Ibid., 321.8. Ibid., 322. 9. Ibid., 323. 10. Grace Tabor, Come into the Garden, excerpt-ed in Allen Lacy, op cit., 339. 11. Frederick Turner, “Cultivating the AmericanGarden: Toward a Secular View of Nature,” inHarper’s Magazine, August 1985, 52.

Michael Pollan is editor-at-large ofHarper’s Magazine; his books includeSecond Nature: A Gardener’s Education(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991) and APlace of My Own: The Education of anAmateur Builder (Random House, 1997).This essay is adapted from a lecture herecently delivered at the University ofWisconsin, Madison.



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Documents

Beyond Wilderness and Lawn