• Malica@lemmy.zipEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    The fossils sitting on hoa boards across the country demand lawns. I do clover and wild flowers because I have a separate garden.

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Ask most people and they want a lawn, not mostly dead gardens. Be realistic and see that a small minority of people actually like to garden.

  • skribe@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    Great idea, but growing anything in the front yard in Oz without a wall is just asking for it to be stolen. Not just the produce, but all the plants.

    • Agent641@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 month ago

      That’s not always true. My neighbour has a large passionfruit vine in his front yard, and any night that I sneak over there to nick some, there’s always plenty of fruit! Never seen anyone over there stealing them

  • RedFrank24@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    1 month ago

    If I ever can afford a house with a garden, it’s going to consist of native plants. I want hedgehogs to live in my garden!

  • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    1 month ago

    Back in the day, a lord having a lawn was a big ‘fuck you!’ status symbol.

    “Look at me! I am so rich that I don’t need to grow food on my land. I can just let it sit here, doing nothing!”

    • Fiona :transbian: :autism: 🔜 eth0, 40c3@blahaj.zone
      1·
      1 month ago

      @DagwoodIII@piefed.social @NickEast_IndieWriter@mastodon.art [citation needed]

      Seriously, we need to stop portraing socoeties that were in quite a few ways less dysfunctional than ours as these backwards places based on vibes informed by bullshit historical fiction.

      The history is more complicated and in many climates lawns aren’t hard to maintain at all (read: rain does the job of watering) and it is nice to lay on the grass or walk on it, which you can’t do in an overgrown field. Both have their place!

      (That it was used to attack black people in the US via HOAs, is a specifuc story, specifuc to one shitty country!)

      • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
        5·
        1 month ago

        Lush, manicured lawns are deeply rooted in the aristocratic traditions of Europe. Originating as a luxury of the European elite, the concept of the lawn as a landscape feature of manor houses was not merely an aesthetic choice, but a potent symbol of wealth and social standing.

        In the grand landscapes of 17th and 18th-century European manor houses, expansive lawns served as the canvas on which the aristocracy could express their dominance over nature and display their economic might. These green expanses required an enormous amount of labor to maintain, far beyond what natural landscapes would demand. The aristocrats employed extensive staffs of gardeners or relied on grazing animals like sheep to keep their lawns at an aesthetically pleasing length. This reliance on manual labor or animal grazing underscored not only the lawns’ beauty but also the wealth and social status of the landowner—only those who could afford such exorbitant maintenance could possess a lawn.

        https://blog.nwf.org/2024/04/why-we-have-lawns/

        I searched ‘why we have lawns.’ It would have taken you much less time to search yourself.

        • Marcella (she/her) :tranarchy_a_queer: :Blahaj:@blahaj.zone
          1·
          1 month ago

          @DagwoodIII@piefed.social @Fiona I have read that the tradition stems from much earlier, like 14th century, when owning land just for leisure and aesthetics was a substantial privilege. For the majority of people getting food on the table was a pressing concern, and the class divide in nutrition was brutal. Having land while giving zero fucks about producing food out of it, that was the real flex at the time.

        • Fiona :transbian: :autism: 🔜 eth0, 40c3@blahaj.zone
          0·
          1 month ago

          @DagwoodIII@piefed.social I can’t help to severely doubt that piece: Maintaining the pure lawn is just not that labor intensive in Europe; maintaining the hedges and flowers-beds and things like that is what takes much more work, but those are not what we are talking about here, yet they are the things we actually tend to find as prestige part of those palaces.

          Like, look at the following picture: This was nowhere near anything that could in any way be considered prestigious for anything but the nature there, and it clearly doesn’t get much maintenance, yet it is basically regular lawn without much human interference.

          And if that is how nature looks like, how would it impress anyone if you had that around a manor? It just doesn’t check out as a prestige thing. The only loud complaints I hear about these kinds of lawns are from the US, where the climate is not really suitable for them and people waste tons of water to maintain them.

          When I listen to specialists on medieval stuff talking (and to be fair, I am far less interested in the post-medival times and I know that that is when a lot of things really started turning to shit) and what was used back then for prestige, we are talking about the size of the Donjon in a castle, about festivities and things like that. Nobody ever mentioned the size of a grass lawn.

          panorama in the Alpen region of a large grass field next to a bikeway. It is vast and not clearly associated with anything.

      • prettybunnys@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        My dude the “lawn” as we know it is an extension of the aristocracy.

        There were commons, but less so as time went on.

        The manicured grass lawn is a holdover from the “manicured / cut down forest” allowing a castle to more easily defend its surrounding area, then the grand sweeping lawns became symbols of status.

        The lawn as it is being discussed here is NOT the common area you’re referring to, everyone wants those …I’d prefer a native clover / grass mix to a monoculture grass that requires fertilizing and maintenance but hey.

        • SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 month ago

          No, but pragmatics know that other “solutions” are even worse. It’s how you get concrete jungles because anything else is too much work or costly to maintain without larger plots of landscaping. Or watering systems that need to be overwintered in places with frost.

          Natives don’t do well surrounded by hot concrete and reflected light all day either. It’s not a one size fit all solution.

            • SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 month ago

              What the hell are you going off about? Those aren’t any opinions I’ve had, if you’ve take any of those from my comments, you’ve clearly misunderstood what was going on. And how’s that relevant to this discussion anyways?

              It’s not actually that easy to maintain native plants, I tried adressing those concerns at a head, but clearly you didn’t care to read what I said.

              Natives plants aren’t just throw in the ground and they’ll always work, you don’t seriously think it’s that simple and easy do you?

        • Fiona :transbian: :autism: 🔜 eth0, 40c3@blahaj.zone
          1·
          1 month ago

          @prettybunnys@piefed.social I’m primarily taking issue with the notion of “everything bad was invented by the evil medieval aristocracy to be the largest possible assholes against everyone else”, when the culture at the time was extremely reliant on mutual respect to the point where something like that was not commonly going to fly.

          But I will also say that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a grass-lawn, I like to be able to do things like this, as I have done in my parents backyard when I was still living there and as I still do from time to time when I visit.

          And yes, nowadays there are extreme summers where they sometimes have a rough time, but the universally awful problems of the US are not really applicable here in central Europe (or at least not yet).

          Me, lying on a large grass field in Luxembourg city.

  • scytale@piefed.zipEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    I hate my lawn so much. It’s ugly because I do the bare minimum to not get fined by the HOA. And I don’t want to waste water and be dumping herbicides just to keep it perfectly manicured. So I just pull the weeds that tend to grow tall, and mow once a month because the grass doesn’t grow too much if I don’t water it.

  • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Yes. A lawn overgrown with invasives like tree of heaven and black swallow-wort.