The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession by Virginia Scott Jenkins, and: Front Yard America: The Evolution and Meanings of a Vernacular Domestic Landscape by Fred E. H. Schroeder

Abstract

1042 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE rates at which farmers adopted different sorts of machinery to the nearly unexamined role of technological experts in agriculture. One of the real strengths of this volume is that all of the authors offer interesting and meaty ideas for future research. While some traditional lines of inquiry seem to be about played out—for example, the facts of productive growth and rural population decline in the 20th century, the legislative battles, the shift from commonsense to science-based practice—other lines of scholarship are virtually un­ touched, at least by agricultural historians. In some cases drawing from work in other branches of history and the social sciences, most of the authors identify fresh questions that will advance the funda­ mental concerns of the held. Surely this is a fine tribute to Rasmussen, himself both a model for and a mentor to several generations of agricultural historians. Deborah Fitzgerald Dr. Fitzgerald is an associate professor in the history of technology at Massachu­ setts Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Business ofBreeding: Hybrid, Com in Illinois and is currently working on a history of industrial agriculture. The Lawn: A History ofan American Obsession. By Virginia ScottJenkins. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Pp. x + 246; illustrations, notes, index. $14.95 (paper). Front Yard America: The Evolution and Meanings ofa Vernacular Domestic Landscape. By Fred E. H. Schroeder. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993. Pp. x+171; illustrations, notes, bibliography. $41.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Virginia Jenkins’s long-awaited book begins with some pretty pow­ erful observations: that (front) lawns are neither necessary nor inevi­ table adjuncts to detached houses; that (front) lawns are an essential (and the most public and also the most frequently observed) element in the made environment which is the American landscape; and that the making and maintaining of (front) lawns require not only an aesthetic “ought” to tell us how our physical world should look but also the desire, the opportunity, the skills, and the materials to make it look that way. “The domestic front lawn is dependent on our ability to grow lawn grasses,” which depends in turn on “the availability and affordability of the tools and grasses needed to grow a lawn” (p. 4). This is “the point that most historians have missed,” says Jenkins. I suppose she means the historians of architecture and landscape architecture, who tend to talk about high-style stuff, and the histori­ ans of domestic architecture and the domestic “landscape,” who tend to talk about The American Values Expressed in the Vernacular Style. She certainly does not mean me, who missed the whole thing and therefore delights in this book full of information I never even knew was information—about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1043 turf laboratories, once located where the Pentagon now stands; about the manufacture and marketing of lawn mowers; about the role of the seed companies, the U.S. Golf Association, and the chemical com­ panies in defining “lawn” as a “velvety carpet” which could be grown and should be grown—all placed neatly and convincingly into the context of the broader social and cultural history of America since the mid-19th century. In her attempt to avoid writing about the domestic front lawn as the product of high-style trickle-down or as the achievement of demo­ cratic vistas, however, she allows her observation about necessity— that is, “the availability and affordability of the tools and grasses needed to grow a lawn”—to become transformed from a research agenda into a kind of vernacular ideology, in which only necessity is the mother of invention, and only that is truly needed which tran­ scends the vagaries of history and culture. Because no one “needs” either a lawn mower or a lawn in these terms, the invention of lawn mowers, of new varieties of grass, and of chemical pesticides and herbicides must have resulted from some sort of capitalist jiggle and commodification of American culture—which is how Jenkins reads the ruthless marketing of lawns, lawn-care products, and lawn-care services since 1920, and by...