A lawn () is an area of soil-covered land planted with grasses and other durable plants such as clover which is maintained at a short height with a lawn mower (or sometimes grazing animals) and used for aesthetic and recreational purposes. It is also commonly referred to as part of a garden.
Lawns are usually composed only of grass species, subject to weed and pest control, maintained in a green color (e.g., by watering), and are regularly mowed to ensure an acceptable length. Lawns are commonly used around houses, apartments, commercial buildings and offices and many city parks also have large lawn areas. In recreational contexts, the specialised names turf, parade, pitch, field or green may be used, depending on the sport and the continent.
The term "lawn", referring to a managed grass space, dates to at least the 16th century. With suburban expansion, the lawn has become culturally ingrained in some areas of the world as part of the desired household aesthetic.Robbins, Paul. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. However, awareness of the negative environmental impact of this idea is growing. In some jurisdictions where there are water shortages, local government authorities are encouraging alternatives to lawns to reduce water use. Researchers in the United States have noted that suburban lawns are "biological deserts" that are contributing to a "continental-scale ecological homogenization." Lawn maintenance practices also cause biodiversity loss in surrounding areas. Some forms of lawn, such as tapestry lawns, are designed partly for biodiversity and pollinator support.
Etymology Lawn derives from Middle English launde, a borrowing from Old French lande (meaning "heath", "clearing"), of either Germanic or Gaulish origin. The word shares an origin with land, and its first recorded use with the meaning of "ground with mown grass" was in the 18th century.
History
Origins
Areas of grass grazed regularly by rabbits, horses or sheep over a long period often form a very low, tight sward similar to a modern lawn. This was the original meaning of the word "lawn", and the term can still be found in place names. Some forest areas where extensive grazing is practiced still have these seminatural lawns. For example, in the New Forest, England, such grazed areas are common, and are known as lawns, for example Balmer Lawn.
Lawns may have originated as grassed enclosures within early medieval settlements used for communal grazing of livestock, as distinct from fields reserved for agriculture. Low, mown-meadow areas may also have been valued because they allowed those inside an enclosed fence or castle to view those approaching. The early lawns were not always distinguishable from pasture fields. The damp climate of maritime Western Europe in the north made lawns possible to grow and manage. They were not a part of gardens in most other regions and cultures of the world until contemporary influence.
In 1100s Britain, low-growing area of grasses and meadow flowers were grazed or scythed to keep them short, and used for sport. Lawn bowling, which began in the 12th or 13th century, required short turf.
The first known documentation of establishing grass using sod instead of seed comes from a Japanese text of 1159.
Lawns became popular with the aristocracy in northern Europe from the Middle Ages onward. In the 1400s, open expanses of low grasses appear in paintings of public and private areas; by the 1500s, such areas were found in the gardens of the wealthy across northern and central Europe. Public meadow areas, kept short by sheep, were used for new sports such as cricket, soccer, and golf. The word "laune" is first attested in 1540 from the Old French lande "heath, moor, barren land; clearing". It initially described a natural opening in a woodland. In the 1600s, "lawn" came to mean a grassy stretch of untilled land, and by mid-century, there were publications on seeding and transplanting sod. In the 1700s, "lawn" came to mean specifically a mown stretch of meadow. Lawns similar to those of today first appeared in France and England in the 1700s when André Le Nôtre designed the gardens of the Palace of Versailles that included a small area of grass called the , or "green carpet", which became a common feature of French gardens. Large, mown open spaces became popular in Europe and North America. The lawn was influenced by later 1700s trends replicating the romantic aestheticism of grassy pastoralism from Italian landscape paintings.
Before the invention of mowing machines in 1830, lawns were managed very differently. They were an element of wealthy estates and manor houses, and in some places were maintained by labor-intensive scything and shearing (for hay or silage). They were also pasture land maintained through grazing by sheep or other livestock.
The English lawn
It was not until the 17th and 18th century that the garden and the lawn became a place created first as walkways and social areas. They were made up of meadow plants, such as camomile, a particular favourite (see camomile lawn). In the early 17th century, the Jacobean epoch of gardening began; during this period, the closely cut "English" lawn was born. By the end of this period, the English lawn was a symbol of status of the aristocracy and gentry.
In the early 18th century, landscape gardening for the aristocracy entered a golden age, under the direction of William Kent and Lancelot "Capability" Brown. They refined the English landscape garden style with the design of natural, or "romantic", estate settings for wealthy Englishmen. Brown, remembered as "England's greatest gardener", designed over 170 parks, many of which still endure. His influence was so great that the contributions to the English garden made by his predecessors Charles Bridgeman and William Kent are often overlooked. at Internet Archive
His work still endures at Croome Court (where he also designed the house), Blenheim Palace, Warwick Castle, Harewood House, Bowood House, Milton Abbey (and nearby Milton Abbas village), in traces at Kew Gardens and many other locations. His style of smooth undulating lawns which ran seamlessly to the house and meadow, clumps, belts and scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers, were a new style within the English landscape, a "gardenless" form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally patterned styles. His landscapes were fundamentally different from what they replaced, the well-known formal gardens of England which were criticised by Alexander Pope and others from the 1710s.Peter Willis, "Capability Brown in Northumberland" Garden History 9.2 (Autumn, 1981, pp. 157–183)
The open "English style" of parkland first spread across Britain and Ireland, and then across Europe, such as the garden à la française being replaced by the French landscape garden. By this time, the word "lawn" in England had semantically shifted to describe a piece of a garden covered with grass and closely mown.
In North America Wealthy families in America during the late 18th century also began mimicking English landscaping styles. British settlers in North America imported an affinity for landscapes in the style of the English lawn. However, early in the colonization of the continent, environments with thick, low-growing, grass-dominated vegetation were rare in the eastern part of the continent, enough so that settlers were warned that it would be difficult to find land suitable for grazing cattle. In 1780, the Shaker community began the first industrial production of high-quality grass seed in North America, and a number of seed companies and nurseries were founded in Philadelphia. The increased availability of these grasses meant they were in plentiful supply for parks and residential areas, not just livestock.
Thomas Jefferson has long been given credit for being the first person to attempt an English-style lawn at his estate, Monticello, in 1806, but many others had tried to emulate English landscaping before he did. Over time, an increasing number towns in New England began to emphasize grass spaces. Many scholars link this development to the romantic and transcendentalist movements of the 19th century. These green commons were also heavily associated with the success of the Revolutionary War and often became the homes of patriotic war memorials after the Civil War ended in 1865.
Middle class pursuit
Before the mechanical lawn mower, the upkeep of lawns was possible only for the extremely wealthy estates and manor houses of the aristocracy. Labor-intensive methods of scything and shearing the grass were required to maintain the lawn in its correct state, and most of the land in England was required for more functional, agricultural purposes.
This all changed with the invention of the lawn mower by Edwin Beard Budding in 1830. Budding had the idea for a lawn mower after seeing a machine in a local cloth mill which used a cutting cylinder (or bladed reel) mounted on a bench to trim the irregular nap from the surface of woolen cloth and give a smooth finish. Budding realised that a similar device could be used to cut grass if the mechanism was mounted in a wheeled frame to make the blades rotate close to the lawn's surface. His mower design was to be used primarily to cut the lawn on sports grounds and extensive gardens, as a superior alternative to the scythe, and he was granted a British patent on 31 August 1830.; see pg 1, col 2. For a copy, see Google Patents copy . This source indicates the patent number as "6,080". According to "British patent numbers 1617–1852 (old series) ", the patent number was assigned sometime after 1852 and took the form of "6080/1830".
Budding went into partnership with a local engineer, John Ferrabee, who paid the costs of development and acquired rights to manufacture and sell lawn mowers and to license other manufacturers. Together they made mowers in a factory at Thrupp near Stroud. Among the other companies manufacturing under license the most successful was Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies of Ipswich which began mower production as early as 1832.
However, his model had two crucial drawbacks. It was immensely heavy (it was made of cast iron) and difficult to manoeuvre in the garden, and did not cut the grass very well. The blade would often spin above the grass uselessly. It took ten more years and further innovations, including the advent of the Bessemer process for the production of the much lighter alloy steel and advances in motorization such as the drive chain, for the lawn mower to become a practical proposition. Middle-class families across the country, in imitation of aristocratic landscape gardens, began to grow finely trimmed lawns in their back gardens.
In the 1850s, Thomas Green of Leeds introduced a revolutionary mower design called the Silens Messor (meaning silent cutter), which used a chain to transmit power from the rear roller to the cutting cylinder. The machine was much lighter and quieter than the gear driven machines that preceded them, and won first prize at the first lawn mower trial at the London Horticultural Gardens. Thus began a great expansion in the lawn mower production in the 1860s. James Sumner of Lancashire patented the first steam-powered lawn mower in 1893. Around 1900, Ransomes' Automaton, available in chain- or gear-driven models, dominated the British market. In 1902, Ransomes produced the first commercially available mower powered by an internal combustion gasoline engine. JP Engineering of Leicester, founded after World War I, invented the first riding mowers.