Some say it’s biodiversity at your doorstep; some say it’s front yard art. However you label the trend, Fritz Haeg’s “Edible Estates”, launched in 2005, has ushered in the death of an iconic American dream: The front lawn. Haeg wants homeowners to surrender their manicured lawns across the country and replace them with aesthetic organic gardens.
British in origin, the lawn was an English Estate owners’ 15th century demonstration of civilizing the wilderness around him by conquering the unruly growth of all natural life, at least to where the sterile monoculture of his docile green grass ended. In those days vegetable gardens were secreted off to the back of the house, as many still are today.
Thomas Jefferson transmigrated the English estate’s tradition of lawn dominated landscapes to Virginia with his Monticello house (now a National Historic Landmark) which became the paradigm of American home tradition — a custom the Rockefellers continued in the mid 19th century, which in turn was embraced by baby boomers in the fifties.
“This obsession with the lawn is, I believe,”writes Haeg, “most entirely a male phenomenon. It is an enticing and toxic stew of male seduction, aggression, and domination. Whether intended to attract a mate, demonstrate wealth, impress his friends, or control every bit nature that surrounds him, the lawn is covered with the fingerprints of masculine tendencies”
Besides our nationwide infantile obsession with lawn envy, lawns waste land, water, and resources; we douse our lawns with chemicals and fertilizers. “And what happens with nitrogen and phosphorous is, it produces an algae bloom,” said landscape architect Diana Balmori. “When that dies down it consumes all the oxygen in the water and kills the fish.”
Fritz Haeg’s intellectually stylized approach to “Edible Estates”is kind of a conventionalized version of Feng shui for the front yard, with an almost homeopathic-type influence on community architecture. In a conversation Abigail Doan ” a soi-disant art farmer ” had with Haeg, she asked him whether there are “DIY guidelines for creating one’s own Edible Estate in places like NYC or any (sub) urban environment for that matter.”She writes, “Haeg emphatically stated, yes’, and that it was perhaps a matter of how one approaches the three-part symbiotic relationship between ecology, community, and (experience-related) poetry that frees one to invent and adapt organically to any situation or locale”
Wow! And all this time I thought growing vegetables was about roto-tilling and weed pulling. Haeg’s “Edible Estates”concept of a front yard garden is basically a recycled spin on the “Victory Gardens” of the 1940’s, notwithstanding Haeg’s soothing holistic and artistic bent. Haeg needn’t nudge America too hard. As I outlined in a previous article, organic gardening is America’s new pastime once again. Be it a lifestyle change, a food safety issues spawned by endless salmonella outbreaks, or a desire to become self sustainable and avoid the soup lines, twenty-five million U.S. households planted vegetable gardens in 2007, according to Bruce Butterfield of the National Gardener’s Association, and that’s expected to increase by several million this year.
But the “Edible Estates”movement isn’t just about art, health, and sustainability, it’s about people coming together as a community. As Times’ M.J. Stephey points out, Clarence Ridgley, one of five homeowners in the U.S. to participate in “Edible Estates”, transformed his banal lawn into a thriving garden of tomatoes, blueberries, strawberries, lettuce, beets and herbs. “People will come to my yard,”says Ridgley, “and pick up an onion sprout and start eating it on the spot. I’ve met more people in the past two months than I have the past 22 years of living here.”