I ONCE LIVED across the street from Mr. Perfect. That wasn’t his real name, of course. I don’t think I ever knew his name. I called him Mr. Perfect because of his yard. I had moved from an apartment in the city to a house in the suburbs, and Mr. Perfect’s yard was just the kind of thing a man used to leave the city for. It was like a shimmering emerald, melted down and smoothed out to a flawless plane that swirled around the trunks of trees and kissed the distant borders where azaleas bloomed. On sun-dappled days the lawn seemed to reflect the blossoms like a plate of glass. My wife and I saw Mr. Perfect as a figure of fun. His devotion to his lawn consumed him. On the few occasions when we talked he spoke with the abstracted air of an astrophysicist, in a language known only to a few; his variegated aeration, he would tell me, had reoxidized his stolons and rhizomes, and I would nod and hurry home to recount the amusing conversation to my wife. At any hour of daylight, in any season, you could look out the window and see him doing something improbable to the grass–basting it in mysterious potions, plucking it and holding it up to the light. “You’re not going to believe it,” my wife said one morning. “Go look.” I went to the window. Mr. Perfect was on his hands and knees, his skinny bottom wagging in the air, his glasses perched on his forehead, holding a ruler against the grass. “He’s measuring the blades,” she said. We chuckled about him long after he had moved away. I chuckle less frequently now. This spring, after years of hiring a mowing service, I seized control of my yard myself. As an opinion journalist I try never to know too much about any one subject, but I’ve learned quite a bit about grass. In mowing I’ve learned, for example, not to violate the Rule of One-Third, which forbids cutting a blade by more than one-third of its height. I love my lawn. I want it to be broad and even and smooth, perfect even as Mr. Perfect’s was perfect. And I notice that as my own views on the subject evolve in one direction, the cultural consensus moves in the other. In the beginning, in America, a yard was the family garbage dump. A lawn, such as those found at Monticello or Mount Vernon, denoted affluence: The owner could afford to set aside a patch of land for purposes of aesthetics or recreation. With the great suburban migration, the lawn was democratized, becoming a sign that anyone, regardless of class or creed, could share in the reflective pleasures of the elites. As part of the general inversion of values accomplished over the last thirty years, affluent Baby Boomers came to see this celebration of upward mobility as a tool of oppression. By the late 1980s, there arose in opposition to the traditional “industrial lawn”–smooth, even, chemical-drenched–a movement in favor of “natural lawns,” bumpy and chemical-free, non-conformist and liberated from man’s hegemony. Another name for the “natural lawn,” of course, is “weeds”; also, eventually, “dirt.” But the natural lawn fulfilled its primary purpose (all Boomer reforms disguise ulterior motives) of releasing the homeowner from the need to take care of his yard. As things turned out, America did to the natural-lawn movement what it does to all revolutionary assaults from within, as it did, for example, to rap music or feminism: It digested it, removed its incendiary ingredients, and spit it back out as yet another anodyne expression of middle-class life. Traditional lawns such as the one I strive for are still deemed vulgar by tasteful people, but the lawn itself has survived, as one “design element” among many. If you look hard at the yuppie yard you might see a narrow rivulet of grass shimmer among broad swaths of other ground covers: ivies and clovers and “rock gardens” and heaps of mulch in every shade of dun. This ideological history has, for me, raised the stakes considerably. I mow, I overseed, I drench with chemicals. I found myself last week pacing the length of the lawn, the day after a grueling session with the mower. I had worried that the grass might be too wet to mow, but I had mowed anyway. There had been unevenness. I had wanted to see the smoothness. I had wanted the flawless emerald plane. But now clumps of clippings were matted in the turf–a sure signal that I had mowed before the grass was properly dry. As I watched helpless, my stolons, my very rhizomes, were weakening, breaking down. I saw one patch where the grass was turning an incipient yellow, then another. I had cut too wet, and I had cut too short. I had violated the Rule of One-Third. Or had I? I ran to the house. My wife stopped me as I turned from the desk in the family room. “Where do you think you’re going with that ruler?” she said. –Andrew Ferguson Mr. Ferguson, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, is a columnist for Bloomberg News.
