GUNPOWDER GARDEN CLUB Notes from Lembke Book - From Grass to Gardens

I am loving From Grass to Gardens and there are so many wonderful gardening tips that I want it available to all, so am entering it on this blog. Following are quotes from Janet Lembke, maybe slightly paraphrased, and my comments, too. Please hit reply and add your own comments.

Pg 39 +
What you take from the earth may be returned to increase its fertility. (Yea for compost.)
She has a great story of trying, incorrectly, red wiggler worms for inside composting.

The poet Virgil writes: pg 33 ++
Perhaps I should also sing what careful cultivation adorns rich gardens and the rose-beds of twice blooming Paestum, and how endives rejoice in the streams that they drink and the green banks, in their celery, and how the cucumber sprawling through the grass swells into a paunch. Nor should I be silent about the late-blooming narcissus or the flexible twigs of acanthus, pale ivy, and shore -loving myrtle. Unless you purse the weeds with a relentless hoe, scare off the birds with shouthing, remove the shade from over-shadowed farmland with a pruning hook, and call down rain with prayers, in van, alas, you'll stare at someone else's heaps of grain and relieve your own hunger by shaking oak trees int he woods. ..then diverts rivulets of running water to his crops and, when the soil dries up, its sprouted grain burnt, in summer's heat - behold! - brings water from the ridge through irrigation channels? Falling, it rushes down the smooth stones with a hoarse white noise and restores the thirsty soil with its bubbling jet.

LAWNS
pg 18+++ is about Lawns. While I do have a lawn, it is not fertilized, nor seeded, nor pesticided. It is mown by gas, so that is a point down for the Chesapeake Bay.
Where does the idea of Lawn come from? To sell Lawn Mowers. To play ball on. naturalist David Quammen, in "Rethinking the Lawn", ...lans were dreamed up by the Communists to keep suburban youngsters in America from giving their energies to tasks more thrilling than mowing.
(A friend of mine said they must have a lawn for their dogs to use.) Turfgrass (redundant) was coined in the twentieth century by the industry. Lawn in 300 years old. Originally the word meant untilled ground, a glade n the woods, or a pasture. The current usage appeared in 1733 in the Gardener's Dictionary "A great plain in a park or a spacious plain adjoining tto a noble seat..."

It developed as a firm rejection of the continental gardens (planned by the architect to be extensions of the building with rooms and geometric symmetry) by the British. William Kent, an English painter and architect decided to relax the continental formality. In 1734, he created a parklike garden of great irregularity - meandering brook, curving paths, trees and shrubs left in thier natural shapes, and, not least, lots of grass.

Then Lancelot "Capability" Brown came up with the convept of a natural landscape that would blur the boundaries of garden and park. Trees set alone or in small clusters, bodies of water and grass in vast sweeps. He changed the formal versailles style of Blenheim Palace grounds in the mid 1700s to this park/lawn setting. Only for the rich, though, because Lawn had to be cut men wielding scythes. Blenheim needed a crew of 50 men with very sharp scythes to cut the grass, then lawn women had to remove the cuttings. Expensive.

Then Edwin Budding invented the push mower in 1830.

Shortly after the Civil War, front lawns became the rage, proclaiming that the owners were successfuly in the middle class.

No turf grasses are native.

Golf was a large factor behind the transformation of grat expanses of shaggy landscape into neatly trimmed greensward.

1996 estimate - 48 million acres is in grass (2.3 billion acres total in US). Why so much? Historian Virginia Scott Jenkins says it is advertising, mass marketing, democratization of golf, the influence of popular magazines, 2 world wars, development of major lawn industry. Virginia spent 2.5 billion dollars in 1998 just on the equipement needed to maintain turf. In 2003 the DIY US cost was 10.4 Billion dollars. 84 millioin households. 78% did lawn care. Average of 1,267 per family. (let's see - mine is less than $400).

Value of grass by James B. Bears and Janet's additions:
1. Dissipates heat and noise better than asphalt - But roar of the mower, gardens will lessen noise too.
2. Beauty - But she likes gardens better
3. No hidey holes for ground hogs, skunks, cottontails (ticks), deer food.
4. Sequesters carbon - so does gardens.
5. Recreational surface.
6. Prevents soil erosion - better done by native things.

Then Janet sys she exterminates grass because Lawn is as sterile to my vision as a cityscape. Only one color. No biodiversity. War against nature.