The Lawn Is A 300 Year Old Marketing Campaign

Nobody owned a grass lawn until someone told them they needed one.

For most of human history, the land around a house grew food, or it grew nothing. Decorative grass wasn’t a concept available to ordinary people. It wasn’t practical, it wasn’t affordable, and it wasn’t considered a marker of anything except extraordinary wealth. The only people with grass lawns were the ones who could afford to dedicate land to something that produced nothing.

That was the point… generally I guess.

At the Palace of Versailles in the 17th century, Louis XIV’s landscape architect André Le Nôtre designed what he called the “tapis vert,” the green carpet, a vast ornamental lawn maintained entirely by hand. Workers called faucilleurs arrived before dawn with long-handled scythes to cut the grass to an even height before the king could see it. Versailles employed armies of people just to keep grass short. The lawn wasn’t about the grass. It was about being able to afford to employ people to maintain something useless.

English aristocrats copied it. The sweeping green lawns of English manor houses became the defining image of landed wealth, kept up by armies of groundskeepers or by letting sheep graze. Only the very wealthy had them. Everyone else grew vegetables.

Then… Americans started going to Europe and coming back with ideas.

Thomas Jefferson of all people, saw the lawns at Versailles and went home to recreate them at Monticello. George Washington brought in English gardeners to design the grounds at Mount Vernon. Jefferson and Washington were the most admired men in the country, and pictures of their estates started getting around, showing Americans what the grounds of a respectable man were supposed to look like.

But there was a huge problem…