Now that we’re all mowing our lawns again, I thought I’d dig up some fun and un-fun facts about the green carpets beneath our feet.
Fun Fact No. 1: We Americans grow a lot of grass. In fact, we devote more acreage to growing grass than we do to growing corn or wheat.
Fun Fact No. 2: Together, we spend somewhere between $50 and $100 billion (sources vary) on lawncare annually.
Fun Fact No. 3: The lawn mower was invented by an Englishman named Edwin Beard Budding in 1830. Before that, everyone used scythes, grim reaper-style.
Twenty years later, a better mower was invented by an Englishman named Thomas Green.
I wish I could tell you that the first steam-powered mower was invented by an Englishman named James Summer, but his name was Sumner. So close.
Not-So-Fun Fact No. 1: America’s contribution to the care and maintenance of lawns came from DuPont and Monsanto, developers and marketers of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.
“By the first decade of the 21st century,” according to Wikipedia’s entry on the topic at hand (OK, so this isn’t exactly a deep dive into lawnlore), “American homeowners were using ten times more pesticides per acre than farmers, poisoning an estimated 60 to 70 million birds yearly.”
Yikes.
Not-So-Fun Fact No. 2: A riding mower, according to this same entry, produces “the same amount of pollution in one hour of use as 34 cars.”
Not-So-Fun Fact No. 3: Then there’s the gas that never quite makes it into the gas tank. Careless power mower owners spill nearly 17 million gallons of gas while refueling. That’s more than was dumped into the sea off the coast of Alaska by the Exxon Valdez in 1989.
Not-So-Fun Fact No. 4: Finally, there are the concerns that launched the worldwide No Mow May movement in 2019: For all their lush verdure, lawns are more desert than dessert as far as bees and butterflies are concerned. But if you let ‘em grow, goes the thinking, flowering weeds will sprout and the critters will be happy.
Sadly, it’s more complicated than that, according to two Penn State entomologists. In a recent article in Discover Magazine, Christina Grozinger and Harland Patch wrote that an unmown lawn will sprout non-native flowering weeds, which will attract non-native pollinators.
(And you know what they say about those non-native pollinators: They’re all ex-cons and drug dealers who speak languages no one has ever heard of.)
No Mow May, according to its critics, helps the plants and pollinators that need help least while doing little for the natives. Instead of taking a one-month hiatus from mowing, our entomologists recommend jettisoning that green carpet altogether and converting your yard into a flower and native plant garden.
Another reason Grozinger and Patch aren’t so crazy about No Mow May: “It creates a favorable habitat for ticks and for wild animals such as deer and rodents that carry ticks.”
Classic, no? We try to be good boys and girls and wind up doing something that’s ineffectual at best, and may even do more harm than good.
You might think that all you had to do to participate in No Mow May was let your mower collect cobwebs in the garage or shed. Not in our bureaucratized age. Here in State College, you had to register with the borough and display a No Mow May yard sign. Otherwise, how would we know our conscientious citizens from our negligent ones?
Lucky for me, the previous owner of my house mostly was ahead of the curve on bee-and-butterfly habitat. She left me a little strip of grass along the curb and a rectangle of lawn in the back that’s about the size of two parking spaces.
My motorless push mower is more than up to the task – provided I keep the grass short. The main reason I didn’t participate in No Mow May, I confess, was not because I was heeding Grozinger and Patch, but because I knew No Mow May would be followed by Can’t Mow June.
Reel mowers are blissfully quiet (the silencing of the Deeres and Toros and whoever else makes mowers may be the best thing about mowerless May) but they don’t cut as well as gas-powered machines, at least not once the blades get dull. Knee-high grass? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Years ago in Southern California I interviewed an Italian-American guy named Liberato DiBernardo. “Italians hate a lawn,” Libby told me as we toured his vegetable garden. “We don’t like to grow anything we can’t eat.”
Very sensible, if you ask me.
But when I recently visited my old house in the land of the Woo People, I was flooded with happy memories of wiffleball and badminton. Our games trampled the lawn, but we were growing something more important than grass: our children.
