Deanna Kreisel
Associate Professor of English
Co-Director Environmental Studies
The University of Mississippi
LAWN
An Environmental Memoir
Overview
I lost my father right around the time I acquired a lawn.
At first I saw no connection between these events. My father died of melanoma in 2018 and a year later I moved to Mississippi and bought a house with an unwanted acre of manicured, chemical-soaked turf attached. The cells that began dividing in my father’s foot, eventually spreading to his lymph nodes, abdominal organs, and brain, began life on a dairy farm in upstate New York. They were fed by the sunshine of 85 barefoot summers, first among grassy fields and dusty farm lanes, and later on the patios and manicured lawns of American suburbia. My plan to leave rainy Canada and return to the States was partly occasioned by his loss. The decision molecules that began dividing in my brain can trace their origin to the relationship I forged with him under the looming trees at the edges of my childhood back yard, among the astringent smells of fresh-cut grass and sweat.​
This is a book about my father’s lawn—about the American lawn—yet it’s also a book about fathers, masculinity, and grief. The tenderness, solicitous care, and sheer rage that my father poured into his lawn would seem ridiculous if they weren’t so ordinary. The desire to wrestle nature into submission, to beat back the anarchic forces of crab grass and moles, to forcibly bend growing things to the shape of one’s will, is the same impulse behind centuries of environmental exploitation and colonial expansion—even behind agriculture itself. But the American lawn is an especially vivid embodiment of these aggressive impulses: ornamental, useless, costly, literally poisonous, it exists only to redound to the glory of the suburban homeowner.
Chapters
PROLOGUE
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Lawn of the Father introduces the reader to my father, who used to shoot up our back yard in the middle of the night in a (losing) battle against gophers. It poses the central question the rest of the book will attempt to answer: Why?
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SECTION I: GENERATION
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The first group of chapters explores the history of the American manicured lawn and its British ancestors alongside the genealogy of my own family, who have been homesteading, clearcutting, wilderness guiding, farming, and mowing on this continent for 13 generations. These opening chapters interweave stories about my father and his battles with his lawn, his struggle to achieve middle-class respectability, his drinking, our family relationships, and the long history of clearcutting and despoliation that is so intimately connected to—and poignantly echoed in—the form of the suburban lawn.
Pests chronicles the intense, widespread hatred of critters that interfere with our vision of the perfect lawn, from my father’s war on our backyard burrowers to Caddyshack to the billion-dollar pesticide industry.
Waves of Grain lays out the European history of the lawn and examines the role of manicured grass in Anglo-American colonialism. The spread of the lawn and the spread of British cultural ideals went hand in hand, from the South African veld represented in Olive Shreiner’s 1883 novel Story of an African Farm through Baden Powell’s Boy Scouts to American university campuses. I also delve into the long-standing class associations of the lawn and consider the connections between my father’s class anxieties and his obsession with his yard.
Mow Problems focuses on the history of mowing techniques as they have shaped our idea of the lawn, and examines the figure of The Mower as a cultural avatar, from the Grim Reaper and the poems of Andrew Marvell to the backyard weekend warrior inaugurated by the spread of suburbia. It also recounts the bittersweet tale of the 1976 Kreisel Family Backyard Kid Olypmics.
SECTION II: LAWN
These three chapters are deeper dives into representations of the lawn in popular culture. They consider the conflicting meanings of lawns as sites of both environmental destruction and community feeling. Giant stretches of manicured grass require the application of pesticides, chemical fertilizer, and enormous amounts of water—they are quite literally deadly—and are also places of hospitality, aesthetic display, and shared pleasures. Do the environmental costs of the lawn nullify its bounties? The chapters in this section delve into what I term the “Blue Velvet Paradox” by tracing the contradictions of the lawn in modern-day sports, wellness culture, and eco-horror.
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The Sporting Life tackles the relationship between athletics, manicured grass, and masculinity, beginning with the history of English lawn sports like bowls and cricket and continuing on to the manicured playing fields of North American playgrounds, schoolyards, and sports stadiums. I also discuss my family’s (long, vexed) relationship with sports—including the years my mother was my softball coach.
Touch Grass explores the association between “nature” and robust mental health, from medieval spa cures to the recent fad for forest bathing. I describe my own struggles with severe anxiety and the role my parents played in helping (and not helping) me learn to cope with my disorder.
The Uncanny Lawn investigates the “dark side” of the lawn and its association with the Gothic and horror—from creepy lawn ornaments to post-War science fiction to the Stephen King novella (and movie adaptation) In the Tall Grass.
SECTION III: MOURNING
The final section explores grief and loss—on a personal level the death of my father and the loss of our family home (and lawn), and on a more global level the grief we are all experiencing as we mourn the passing of ecosystems, species, and lifeways lost to climate change. The connection between lawns and death is (barely) buried in our collective unconscious: the rural cemetery movement of the mid-nineteenth century pushed for the replacement of crowded urban burial grounds with rolling turf laid like a carpet over graves arranged in a spacious grid. These chapters explore the concept of ecological mourning—the existential anxiety induced by environmental change—and consider the role of the lawn in our current ecological disaster. Toward the end of this section I turn to the concept of utopia and offer some possible alternatives to helplessness, to grief, and to the lawn itself.
A Fine and Private Place discusses the comparatively recent use of manicured lawns in cemeteries, and how anodyne, sanitized carpets of grass have become associated with deathliness and purity. I take the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial as a test case, and do a deep dive into the archival records of the American Battle Monuments Commission that planned the layout of the cemetery from 1947 to 1956. I also consider the layout and design of the Veterans’ Cemetery where my parents are buried and the grave of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi.
No Place draws on my scholarly research on the history of utopian movements from the late 19th century to the present. What guidance does earlier utopian thinking about landscapes and communal green spaces have to offer in our current moment of ecological disaster? I also discuss more fully my father’s death and my own decision not to have children.
Re-Wild Thing details my own attempts to re-wild my new front lawn in Mississippi, and how the (semi-successful) attempt raises questions about what it means to be native or invasive, and the complicated nature of community. I also figure out how—maybe—at least for the time being—to say goodbye to my dad.