Okay, I'm about to lay down some garden history.
1. People in acient Rome, Byzantium, and the early Renaissance had gorgeous gardens with all sorts of flowers and plants and pots and even greenhouses made with selenite.
2. In the 1700s, people wanted to recapture the Renaissance and ancient cultures, which was when a lot of neoclassical architecture popped up. One way people were doing this was by recreating gardens.
3. Some dipshit (can't remember his name) saw gardens all overgrown with greenery and thought that those were the plants they had grown in those beds, and started this trend of greenery-only gardens.
4. This is where hedge mazes and lawns comes from, not because "I'm rich and have nothing better to do with it." It wasn't about emulating royalty, it was about emulating the great thinkers of the past, but in a fundamentally flawed way.
5. At the exact same point in time, games that required open spaces like golf, and bowling started moving out of their grassy homelands of primarily Scotland (but other games like tennis were a thing, too) and started integrating with the rest of Europe as the melting pot that was the American and Australian colonies mingled them together.
6. This turned greenery gardens into much flatter areas as they needed the space for recreation. However, it wasn't a monoculture.
7. Lawns were very diverse spaces. Low-growing vines, chamomile, thyme, clover, as well as various grasses local to the area (sedges, hays, crabgrass, etc.) were all common and created something much more similar to a prairie or a forest glen.
8. After WW2, poison manufacturers needed a new product because no one was buying mustard gas anymore. They reworked their various poisons to become "nontoxic" to humans in small doses but killed plants and insects, and herbicides and insecticides were born.
9. However, they couldn't figure a way to kill prickly weeds like prickly lettuce without also killing all the other broad-leafed plants, which includes clover and thyme and chamomile, so they launched a campaign to tell everyone that multiculture lawns were bad and if you wanted to be a good suburban homeowner, you wouldn't have any weeds like clover in your yard, so buy this weed killer and get the flawless grass lawn you've always wanted.
That is how lawns were invented, a bunch of miniature steps and if you wanted a lawn for golfing and lawn bowling and tennis and croquet, you could absolutely do it because there are dozens of walkable plants that can be symbiotically grown and also don't denigrate people in the 1800s when it was clearly the fault of the 50s.
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