The modern lawn is more than just a patch of grass. It’s a story we’ve been retelling for centuries.

Winter is bearing down on Cape Town as I write this article, and while it may not be my favourite season, there is one thing about it that I love: for the next few months, I won’t have to water my lawn. 

In the height of the dry summer, I have to set reminders on my phone so I don’t forget to go out and drag hosepipes and sprinklers across the grass (for the eco-conscious readers – don’t worry, it’s borehole water), and then set more alarms in 40 minute intervals so I don’t also forget to go out and reposition said sprinklers. 

I’m always either neglecting my grass to the point that it turns yellow or overwatering it to the point that it turns yellow. So when winter comes around, I breathe a sigh of relief, sit back and let nature take care of the watering schedule for a while. 

Ubiquitous though it may be, grass certainly didn’t earn its popularity by being a low maintenance addition to the garden. That’s probably why so many of my neighbours are defecting to astroturf – none of the watering or mowing required, and if you turn your head and squint at it from a distance, it kind of looks like the real thing. I can’t fault the logic, but there’s just something a little too dystopian about a plastic lawn; it gives me the shivers. 

How did we get to the point where most of our outside spaces are dominated by a singular plant species? It won’t surprise you to learn that there’s an interesting story there.

An idea as old as grass

Before they were bestowed upon homeowners as part of their private property, lawns were in fact a communal thing. 

The first “lawns” were probably what we would call village greens or town commons. This is a concept that developed in England during the Middle Ages, and the use case back then was more practical than decorative. Villagers found it useful to have a central green space where animals like cows, sheep and horses could be gathered overnight in order to protect them from wild animals or human thieves. By day, an open green space came in handy for setting up markets and conducting trade.

Any animal that belonged to a villager had the right to graze on this communal pasture; as a result, the perpetually-getting-eaten grass was always at a cropped length. In time, this short-length grass became known as lawn.

Very soon, those who lived outside the village – the aristocracy in their castles – adopted the idea of lawns as well. There were multiple reasons why this made sense for them: for one thing, it kept their livestock grazing close to home, right outside the castle walls, where they were easier to keep an eye on. A lawn dotted with peacefully grazing animals also did good things for the landowners image, as it aligned them well with the pastoral images of sheep and shepherds so often mentioned in the Bible. Having sheep grazing outside your castle was therefore considered a sign that you were a good and pious Christian. 

And then there was the downright practical fact that enemies approaching your castle were that much easier to spot if they were trying to sneak up on you over a closely cropped lawn versus, say, from a densely wooded forest. Clear the trees, clear the view of trouble approaching. 

Popularity up, practicality down

Fast forward a few centuries to the 1700s, and the popularity of lawns was only going up. Thanks to their adoption by the aristocracy in the Middle Ages, flat expanses of grass had gained a powerful aspirational appeal. 

This appeal was fanned by the fact that nobles soon tired of having their lawns maintained by animals, as was the original, mutually beneficial arrangement. The height of luxury now was having the ability to stroll across your grounds without encountering a grazing animal (or a grazing animal’s droppings). 

So lawns stayed, but the animals that maintained them got put out to pasture (quite literally). But then what was going to stop the grass from growing to knee-grazing lengths? Well, people, of course. Not the nobles themselves, but people they employed, similarly to how they employed people to pick fruit in their orchards or harvest barley in their fields. 

Herein lies the flex, as we Millennials like to say. Much like today, land in the 18th century was a signal of wealth. The more land you had, the more food you could cultivate, animals you could keep, or mills you could put up. All of the work that went into your land produced things that you could either eat or sell, and that was why you were rich. 

Now imagine you have fertile land, and you use it to grow something that adds absolutely no value beyond its aesthetic. You cannot eat your lawn or cut it down and sell it. In fact, keeping it costs you money – you have to water it regularly and then pay someone to cut it down with a scythe once a fortnight so it continues to look nice. 

To someone living through the 18th century, seeing a rolling expanse of lawn implied one thing: that the landowner had so much land and so many resources that they could afford to waste some of it on something as useless and demanding as grass. It was the horticultural equivalent of spotting a golden Rolex on someone’s wrist. 

Remember, even back then, grass was hard work – one could argue that it was probably even harder work then than it is now, because sprinkler systems and lawnmowers hadn’t been invented yet. A lawn was therefore as much a symbol of wealth as it was a symbol of the landowners ability to (pay someone to) control nature, exert power over it and shape it to their will. 

Grass goes global

If we accept that lawns were first conceptualised and idealised in the Northern Hemisphere, then how did they manage to spread all over the world? Well, as it happens, the British were on somewhat of a world tour between the 16th and 17th centuries, and adding many exotic colonies to their collection along the way. 

The British lawn fetish was transferred to these new colonies through a number of turf-based British sports like cricket, football, rugby and golf. Before long, lawns were springing up in places like India and North America – climates that were not necessarily ideal for a plant species that required a temperate climate and a steady supply of water. 

With every apparent restriction that nature tried to put on the growing of grass, humanity doubled down on our desire for it. Consider the fact that, from a climate perspective, the USA is actually a very hard place to maintain a green lawn. Approximately 40% of the continent is arid or semi-arid. 70-75% of the continent gets winter snow, with around 50% receiving significant amounts of it. 

While it isn’t technically impossible to grow grass under these conditions, it takes a lot of resources to do so – significantly more so than it would to grow indigenous plants that are adapted to each region’s climate and soil. Yet to this day, a green lawn is an unshakeable part of the American Dream™ (white picket fence sold separately).

Is the grass still greener?

Lawns were never about practicality or ecology. They were never even really about grass. They were about signalling.

First, it was the signal of order in a chaotic world: a neatly cropped space where animals gathered and communities met. Then it became a signal of power: land cleared to expose enemies, to project control, to frame a castle just so. Later, it evolved into a signal of wealth: land so abundant it could be rendered useless, labour so cheap it could be spent maintaining something purely ornamental.

That signal survived the centuries. It followed ships across oceans, embedded itself in suburban dreams, and arrived here, in a water-scarce corner of Cape Town, borehole-water hosepipe in hand.

Because if you strip it back, the modern lawn is a kind of default setting we rarely question. We water it, mow it, fertilise it; not because it makes sense, but because it’s what a “proper” home is supposed to look like.

But what exactly are we trying to prove? That we have control over nature? That we can afford the water? That we belong to a centuries-old aesthetic rooted in European climates and aristocratic ideals?

So maybe the question isn’t why lawns are a thing. 

Maybe it’s: why are they still?

About the author: Dominique Olivier

Dominique Olivier is the founder of human.writer, where she uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.

Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.

She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.

Dominique can be reached on LinkedIn here.