Sunday, September 14, 2008STEVE WOODWARD
The Oregonian Staff
No crop captures the American soul more than lawns.
Forget amber waves of grain. Envision, instead, emerald waves of turfgrass that stretch from sea to shining sea, a continental carpet that leapfrogs from home to home, park to park, campus to campus. Unlike amber grain, a green lawn is equally likely to exist in Portland, Maine; Portland, Ind.; Portland, N.D.; or Portland, Ore.
If grass were a food crop, it would be the largest in the United States. Imagine nearly 50,000 square miles of lawn, about the size of Mississippi, often doused in pesticides, fed with chemical fertilizers, protected by weedkillers, drenched in 270 billion gallons of water a week and cut with mowers that emit as much as a third of some types of urban air pollution.
Oregon’s $500 million grass-seed industry has a huge stake in America’s lawns, supplying 99 percent of the nation’s ryegrass seed and more than half of all grass seed.
Since the end of World War II, a perfectly trimmed and watered front lawn has been the homeowner’s declaration of civic responsibility. But several factors — rising food costs, environmental awareness, concerns about food safety and a desire for local food — have caused the pendulum to swing.
“For many years, our ideal was to have a home with a big lawn,” says Julie Nader, a 73-year-old resident of the Woodhaven subdivision in Sherwood. “Now we know it’s ridiculous to pour all this water and fertilizer on it.”
So this weekend, Nader joins a new American lawn ritual. She plans to rip out her green grass and replace it with herbs.
She’s a convert: “I want to encourage other people.”
Nader is hardly alone. We are reconsidering the lawn — back and front — in ever-increasing numbers. Many grow lawns organically. Others let grass go dormant in summer. Some replace grass with native plants and flowers.
But the true pioneers look at their yards and see . . . farms.
To be sure, grass has its place. Kids romp on it, families picnic on it, golfers and ballplayers compete on it. Grass soothes the eye, creates a private space between house and street, and cools the urban landscape as water evaporates.
But many Americans now see lawns as wasted opportunity.
Take a walk in the Woodlawn neighborhood in Northeast Portland, and you’ll see the future in front yard after front yard.
First stop: the Northeast Durham Avenue home of Gregg Lavender, wife Nikki Kress and four roommates.
On a sunny Sunday morning, Lavender putters around the neighborhood of modest homes. His own yard is filled with squash, beets, leeks, peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, raspberries, cucumbers, pole beans and eggplant. Roommate Kylie Jo Neal tends the garden, and the household shares the harvest. The garden is the legacy of two former roommates — one an erstwhile rice farmer in Indonesia for the Peace Corps and the other a former farmer in southern Oregon.
Second stop: the 50-by-100-foot corner lot next door, where Travis Scrivner lives.
His front yard brims with a variety of salad greens, onions, leeks, brussels sprouts, basil, carrots, tomatoes, beans, beets, shelling peas and berry patches. The parking strip along the side of the house is filled with squash. Scrivner also planted 13 fruit trees in addition to the cherry tree already there when they moved in three years ago.
“My wife is kind of traditional, so she was kind of worried about how it might look on the public edge,” says Scrivner, a landscape designer who does mostly civic and commercial work.
But the neighbors stop not to complain, but rather to talk and seek gardening advice — as well as load up on fruits and vegetables.
With two young children, the couple chose to develop some play space; plans include a grass strip in front and a patio around the side. But the edible garden remains the star of the show. Scrivner says it’s the age-old discussion about form vs. function.
“I don’t think having a lawn just to cover dirt is a good reason for having a lawn.”
Third stop: the terraced front yard of Mark Saldana, a co-owner of Good Neighbor Pizzeria, just down the street on Dekum.
The former French chef picks organic tomatoes and herbs from his garden on his way to work. They’ll find their way into pizzas and salads, as will the ripening sunflower seeds. He also tends 300 tomato plants in the yard of his landlord’s other house, empty during a renovation.
“You could seriously walk around this neighborhood,” Saldana says, “and not starve.”
And so it goes.
Berries. Tomatoes. Herbs. Lettuce. Artichokes. Leeks. Onions.
On the sidewalk across the street from Scrivner’s house, Scrivner and Lavender pause to pick passion fruit from plants grown by Sascha Perrins and Anne Sutherland.
Perrins, principal of Jason Lee Elementary School, and Sutherland, a family doctor, opted not to farm their front lawn. But the backyard provides a variety of fruits and vegetables for the couple, the occasional neighbor and their 2-year-old daughter.
“I wanted her to grow up,” Perrins says, “knowing that she could eat food grown in the backyard.”
Out of this cornucopia, one front yard stands out like a museum exhibit of a bygone era: a brilliantly green, crisply trimmed, fertilized and mown blanket of velvety lawn.
The community aspect of front-yard gardening is what the nationwide food-not-lawns movement is all about: local food, organic farming, productive use of urban land, sharing with neighbors and organizing the community with gardens.
The movement had its origins in the Food Not Lawns grass-roots gardening project in Eugene. The project gained a widespread following with the 2006 publication of “Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community,” by co-founder Heather C. Flores.
One of Flores’ disciples is Brian Smith, a computer engineer who farms his front, side and back yards in Southeast Portland. When Smith bought his house about three years ago, red lava rocks covered the small front yard. Weeds covered the narrow parking strip. With his interest in gardening, Smith raked up the red rocks and brought in rhubarb, artichokes, sage, echinacea, motherwort and a cherry tree that yielded about two dozen cherries this summer. The parking strip sprouted cabbage, collard greens, basil, rosemary, chocolate mint and roses.
The first year, he grew corn. After returning from a camping trip, he discovered that a neighbor had harvested every last ear for herself.
“The whole incident with the corn made me give up the idea that this is my stuff,” he says.
Now he encourages neighbors to help themselves — within reason.
“We’re trying to promote this thing about the front lawn,” he says.
The classic suburban lawn arguably was popularized by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. If the name sounds familiar to Portlanders, it’s because his stepson, John Charles Olmsted, created the famous 1903 plan for the city’s system of parks and boulevards.
In 1868, the elder Olmsted designed one of the nation’s first planned suburbs, Riverside, near Chicago. In an essay, “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns,” food writer Michael Pollan says Riverside’s homeowners had to maintain lawns that flowed seamlessly from one to the other, “creating the impression that all lived together in a single park.”
The Olmsteds drew on the historical underpinnings of the lawn. British aristocrats began growing grassy front lawns in the early 18th century as a sign of wealth: They were so rich that they could waste their publicly visible land on vegetation that had no purpose other than to look good.
Elizabeth Kolbert, writing recently in The New Yorker, notes that a succession of technologies propelled the growth of lawns: the invention of the mower in 1830, the synthesis of ammonia in 1909 and subsequent development of fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides. Turf management became a college-degree program.
At the same time, society changed. Architect and artist Fritz Haeg notes several postwar factors that favored lawns in “Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn”: the introduction of the leisure weekend, abundant fresh water, cheap gasoline for lawn mowers, the rise of homeownership and the explosion of suburban housing developments.
“Right now, we think a lawn is beautiful,” says Haeg, whose unrelated exhibit “Animal Estates” is on display through Oct. 5 at Reed College’s Cooley Gallery.
Haeg’s Edible Estates is an independent art project in which Haeg oversees the conversion of typical front lawns into edible landscapes. He’s done six so far.
“It’s not about perfection,” he said recently, while he was in Portland overseeing installation of his exhibit. “It’s changing ideas about what’s beautiful.”
Los Angeles-based Haeg says he’s seen an “exponential increase” in interest in front-yard gardens like those in Edible Estates.
“The project is at the nexus of so many issues,” he says. “Water, community, aesthetics, design. And it’s political.”
Political? Haeg wants people to realize they have choices. A yard doesn’t have to be grass.
Glen Andresen moved into his Northeast Portland house about 21 years ago, when the yard was entirely grass. Today, nearly every square inch of the 60-by-100-foot corner lot produces food. The front yard is jammed with lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli and 40 fruit trees, trained to grow flat on espaliers, and filled with apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches and figs. Andresen also keeps 30 bee colonies for honey, pollination and entertainment, although 10 of the colonies are loaned out to a blueberry farm.
Walking from front yard to backyard, the 52-year-old host of “The Dirtbag” on KBOO radio passes a big-leaved rhubarb at the side of the house, under an arbor dripping with three varieties of grapes, past beds of strawberries and into a backyard filled with leeks, onions, broccoli, squash, carrots, eggplant, chard, green beans and peppers.
There’s even a patch of grass.
After converting the front yard into a producing garden over several years, he decided to extend the garden onto the parking strip in the side yard, between the sidewalk and the street.
“All I was doing was mowing my lawn,” he says of the strip, “and I thought, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous.’ ”
Andresen says his garden stops many passers-by who want to gawk, kibitz and ask questions. He shares the harvest with friends and neighbors. Three neighbors have even started their own front-yard gardens.
At the end of World War II, Haeg writes in “Edible Estates,” more than 80 percent of Americans grew some of their own food.
Corina Reynolds, 28, says she was raised around grandparents who kept their wartime victory-garden mentality, growing their food in a garden that bordered a big backyard in St. Johns in North Portland.
Now Reynolds looks at gardens through the lenses of economics and sustainability.
“My goal is to grow everything edible,” says Reynolds, who lives in Southeast Portland. “I’d say 90 percent of what we grow we use, even if it’s not something we actually eat.”
The front yard is devoted to edible herbs and flowers. The rest supports corn, beans, squash, eggplant, pumpkins, peas, lettuce, chard, broccoli, cabbage, artichokes, kale, cucumber, potatoes, and hot and sweet peppers. Fruits include raspberries and blackberry starts. She has sunflowers for seeds and grains such as quinoa and sorghum. There are herbs such as amaranth, rosemary and echinacea.
And, naturally, a pear tree.
Donna Smith, a co-owner of Your Backyard Farmer, an urban-farming and teaching business, says one of the hardest tasks is to persuade people to let go of the archetypal image of a green, grassy front yard.
“I’m teaching people not to be fearful of their front space,” the Southeast Portland woman says. “When one neighbor does it, other neighbors do it.”
In “Turf War,” a recent article in The New Yorker, Kolbert writes: “This is perhaps the final stage of the American lawn. What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them.”
Maybe not so much in Portland, where a company called Edible Skylines even seeks to farm vegetables and fruits on rooftops.
“Once you start landscaping for foodstuff, your neighbors catch on,” Reynolds says. “It’s contagious in a good way.”