Fern: Oh Iowa! It was cold this week but the lawns are greening up. I’ve been reading about “No-Mow May.”
Joe: What’s that? I haven’t looked at our lawn since the doctor told me that my primary allergy was to grass.
Fern: The idea of No Mow May is to refrain from mowing during the month of May. This allows flowers to bloom in your lawn, helps early season pollinators and nurtures the landscape for native biodiversity.
Joe: Are we going to do that?
Fern: Well, no. But I am trying to give up a little more of the lawn each year to indigenous plants and trees. Did you have a nice lawn growing up in Ohio?
Joe: Our first home in America, the apartment above my father’s grocery near downtown Toledo had no green space at all. Out front it was concrete sidewalks. There was a bar next door and another one on the corner. We had more than our share of winos, one of whom nearly abducted me. A bus driver with a blackjack came to the rescue. Ours was not a high-end neighborhood.
Fern: When my family moved from the city to suburban Long Island in the mid 50’s everyone was thrilled to be concrete-free. Having an expanse of green lawn was a sign that you had made it. At least made it out of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Everyone wanted lawns. New homeowners reseeded, watered, edged and nourished their lawns. Men came home from work and inspected their lawns more carefully than they did their children’s hands before dinner. On weekends, there was a continuous din of mowers. Even the air smelled green.
Joe: Out back of our home was a gravel alley with garbage cans and lots of weedy plants. Also rats. My mother did grow cilantro in a pot in the window. Our view out of that window was the black tar roof of my dad’s grocery. And beyond that, the alley.
One particular weed I later learned is called the Tree of Heaven, or Ailanthus altissima. It’s an opportunistic urban tree and grows in alleys, behind billboards and wherever you find disturbed earth.
Fern: That’s the tree in the book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, one of my favorite childhood books. I read it maybe half a dozen times.
Joe: Altissima has long leafy stems that my brother and I would break off the branch, strip the leaves away and use the stems as rapiers for swordfights
.Fern: There was one family on our suburban block, the Sperlings, who didn’t have a lawn. When they first moved in, the Sperlings planted shrubs and fruit trees in the front yard of their split-level home. Then they let weeds grow where a righteous lawn should have been. They never mowed. They never trimmed a living thing. In a few years, the house was barely visible. My mother would shake her head as we drove by. “Those Sperlings,” she would sigh. I imagined a family of wild things hidden behind all that vegetation. Other neighbors were similarly aghast, assuming the Sperlings were wacky and perhaps a little dangerous. Someone observed that the Sperlings were probably beatniks.
Joe: It’s still difficult today to live in a traditional neighborhood and not participate in lawn maintenance. There’s the family on the corner of our street who . . .
Fern: The ones with the sign: Prairie in Progress. Though it’s not quite a prairie. More like neglect. And dangerous. Because tall weeds block the view to turning vehicles.
Joe: Not to mention the open invitation to critters of all sorts. That’s the one positive of having a lawn: a clear open space provides a barrier that small animals are reluctant to venture out on, especially with owls and hawks around.
Fern: I’ll admit that a verdant lawn is a thing of beauty. Our front lawn looks ok, I guess, even though I don’t use herbicides to keep out the weeds. I do love mulch. And even occasionally dig up dandelions. I say, not so fast there, little yellow buddy, nobody likes you. True that after their fluffy heads blow off, dandelion stems are particularly unattractive. There’s also personal taste. One man’s ground cover is another’s Creeping Charlie.
Joe: The unblemished lawn is a democratic American ideal, a perfect, green expanse, unbroken from neighbor to neighbor. A lawn is the fulfillment of the American dream as revealed in “The Great Gatsby,” representing what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the fresh, green breast of the new world.”
Fern: That sounds . . . very literary. You write, I understand.
Joe: And paint! My studio was so cold today I had to turn on the space heater.
Fern: This last week it actually snowed. Sure didn’t feel like spring.
Joe: That’s Iowa for you.
Fern: And now cold political winds are blowing us back to the fifties: The most extreme antiabortion laws, support of child labor, book-banning, meanness against our most vulnerable population, gun, guns, guns. And now a state agency gets to decide what the auditor’s office can look at? Just ugh!
Joe: Politics again? I should have guessed.
Fern: I plant my garden with good intentions. Trimming dead branches, cutting away dead wood, lamenting the loss of young hostsas served for a rabbit brunch. Dig, plant, mulch. We try to make things work together. You, happy, sun-loving Zinnias? You delicate Astilbe remain hiding in the shade. I see you.
Most of what comes up though the rich earth of this amazing land will survive and bloom. It can’t be too much to want the same for our country.
“Tree of Heaven” Joe Geha 18”x24” acrylic on canvas
Love the discussion-thank you! The last sentence says it all, Fern. Joe, I love the painting.