Word: lawns
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...what are the environmental impacts? How much money is spent on the labor, water, fertilizer, pesticide, grass seed and other materials involved in the annual lawn transformation? Clearly, as attested to by the vigor and duration of the landscape assault, the lawn is high priority, and big bucks are spent...
Spring has sprung; the rites are upon us. The annual process of Making Sure the Lawn Looks Perfect for Commencement-- a process which, for many of us, is dialectically invested with both anticipation and dread--is once again underway. The squadron of landscape-artists has been unleashed; like Stravinsky, they aspire to create a magnum opus of the season's rituals. With ardor, with bags of dirt, they have already begun to transform the Yard from a relatively pleasant, serene meadow into a confusion of cordons, chemical grass simulacra and bare patches of earth hideous to behold. Harvard subsists...
...There are. A closer glance at the lawn reveals that the grass ritual is not borne of practical necessity, but that Harvard nonetheless has a vested interest in maintaining the perfect condition of the Yard...
...lawn in the Yard is a deeply, powerfully invested symbolic vehicle of meaning. It represents Harvard's economic and cultural imperialism, its sexist and elitist tendencies and its dichotomous aspiration to identify with both the British Oxbridge educational model and the American Way of life. The small "green span" we constantly traverse wields at least as much power--albeit of a different sort--as the Fed Head himself. Who knew...
...Lawns were not always the chosen landscape of the educational countryside; Oxford and Cambridge adapted and refined their expanses of herbiage to conform to fashion dictates. Oxbridge was the seat of elite male education in Britannia. In her 1994 work, "The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession," Virginia Scott Jenkins relates how the lawn concept emerged in the 18th century, when the gardens at Versailles were designed to include a small lawn, called the "tapis vert" and the popularity of Lancelot Brown's landscape stylings in Britain ("a new, elite style characterized by a mixture of meadows, water...