Rows of homes are just "a series of private madhouses."
Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape designer, who designed in 1868 one of the first planned suburban communities in the USA, just outside Chicago. He laid out the ground rules for what would become a nationwide institution: each house would be set back 30ft from the road, and any kind of exterior division (walls, hedges, fences) was banned. This was partly a dig at the 'high dead walls' of English culture, which he believed made a rows of houses seem like 'a series of private madhouses'.
A smooth, closely shaven surface of grass in front of every home would become the most essential element to an American suburban landscape. This collective lawn became a vehicle of consensus, a symbolic expression of America's irredeemably contradictory values towards the land: that it is both a great, unfenced, communal resource, liberated from the petty individualism of Europe, and at the same time an arena for the aggresive advance of the pioneering spirit.
The problem is that the watchful neighbourhood places immediate pressures on the owner of the lawn, to keep its unblemished identity sacred, and that if you do not participate in its prissy upkeep you are guilty of some kind of betrayal. If you default out of its maintenance, and – God forbid, allow wildflowers to set seed and grow – you have opted out of the social contract.
[source: Richard Mabey, Weeds (Profile, 2010)
