Why Mow?

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From Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
by Michael Pollan
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"Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it: each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine.  Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination.  I ruled a totalitarian landscape.

"Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations.  I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus.  Me?  The case could certainly be made.  Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again?  Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed.  Lawns are nature purged of sex or death.  No wonder Americans like them so much...

"Gardening, as compared to lawn care, tutors us in nature's ways, fostering an ethic of give-and-take with respect to the land.  Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place.  They lessen our dependence on distant sources of energy, technology, food, and for that matter, interest.  For if lawn mowing feels like copying the same sentence over and over, gardening is like writing out new ones, an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery.  Gardens also teach the necessary if un-American lesson that nature and culture can be compromised, that there might be some middle ground between the lawn and the forest - between those who would complete the conquest of the planet in the name of progress, and those who believe it's time we abdicated our rule and left the earth in the care of its more innocent species.  The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway."

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Michael Pollan is currently the editor of Modern Library's gardening series, a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine, and on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.  His other works include The Botany of Desire, A Place of My Own, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules and In Defense of Food.
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