Chapter One: Why We Mow Back in the Fifties, a neighbor used to joke that his lawn -- without a doubt the greenest, thickest, most perfect one on the street -- cost him $5,000 every summer. This was a wild exaggeration, of course, but we got the point. The bucks went mostly for water, but a considerable amount was consumed by fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, spring and fall top-dressing, a bag or two of seed to spruce up bare areas and a few rolls of sod to replace grass consumed by white grubs. As he unloaded lawn-care supplies from his trunk after a visit to the local nursery on Saturday mornings, my neighbor would laugh about his obsession to anyone within hearing distance, poking a little fun at himself. But his jokes were telling. He was inordinately proud of his lawn, and spent hours cutting or grooming it. He tended to its every complaint with the attention of a doting mother to a sick child. I doubt if our neighbor ever figured out exactly how much his thick carpet of turf cost.

It remained lush and deep green all season, despite grass''s tendency to become dormant in mid-summer, and in spite of the occasional all-season drought. Drought he considered nature''s biggest challenge, an occasion to rise to with the fervor of a warrior whose turf, literally, had been invaded. He and his grass always triumphed. The texture was always soft, with blades thicker than the tufts in my new plush broadloom. His lawn was so perfect that the kids in the neighborhood preferred it to their jungle gyms for afternoon play. Our neighbor -- a kind man, really -- gritted his teeth and looked the other way as they somersaulted and tumbled on its velvety surface. His lawn was a prized possession he''d rather admire than use. Even in my naive youth I suspected our neighbor was lording it over us.

But this was the fifties, and the lawn was king. The rest of us on the street, newly married suburbanites with our first homes, actually envied him -- he''d reached a level of lawn nirvana we couldn''t yet achieve, but we would one day. We couldn''t imagine it any other way. Were lawns the law? They might as well have been. At the very least there was an unwritten rule that grass would be the feature of the front yard, backed by evergreen foundation plantings and maybe a shade tree in the center of the lawn. Neighbors with patchy or unmown grass were frowned upon, or worse. The unspoken threat of a call to the bylaw officer always hung in the air. The appearance of a single dandelion made us shudder and offer to loan the culprit a can of our most lethal herbicide -- after all, we had standards to uphold.

On occasion we veered a degree or two from total conformity: for example, the island shrub bed planted by an eccentric neighbor to replace the yews and junipers under the picture window was considered a blatant example of front-yard rebellion, until we decided we liked the effect and began to copy the idea. But none of us could part with our lawns. They were as necessary to the suburban landscape as our cars. Our neighborhood, in fact, was little different from any other in North America. For nearly a century the groomed front lawn had been de rigueur on almost every street on this continent. At last count, more than 24 million acres of lawn grow in North America, and this doesn''t include grasslands and areas such as highway embankments. The care and feeding of grass has become a multibillion-dollar business for lawn-care companies and for manufacturers of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, lawn mowers and all the related equipment The lawn itself is an institution, gracing more than suburban subdivisions. Highway cloverleafs have lawns, as do cemeteries, golf courses and the large corporations that take up acres of land on the outskirts of cities.

Our Love of Lawns: Nature or Nurture? Where did our love of grass come from? Why are we so obsessed with lawns? One theory was put forward a few years ago by Dr. John Falk, an ecologist and former special assistant at the Smithsonian Institution, as the result of research and surveys conducted since 1978. He calls it the Savanna Syndrome. In his view; our love of grass dates back to the time when humans roamed the savannas of Africa in search of food. We preferred to forage on grassy plains dotted with copses of trees because they offered protection from predators, which we could easily spot as they crept up on us in the short grass. Over the millennia, this was encoded in our DNA. Of course, not a word of this can be proven, although many psychologists agree that humans have an innate preference for open spaces that provide "legibility" which means an environment that''s clear and easily understood. Many non-professionals among us firmly believe our love of grass -- and of gardening in general -- is an instinctive throwback to our pastoral roots or to our need to prove our superiority over nature.

I confess to having expounded on these theories more than once myself. I swear my own early interest in gardening is genetic (I come from a long line of farmers), and I wasn''t the only one on our street to recognize that our neighbor''s obsession with his grass revealed his need for control. But we need only look back in history to realize that cultivation of the land in general has always reflected our need to understand and control nature, if only to survive. The ancient walled gardens of Persia were physical and psychological sanctuaries from the harsh environment beyond medieval gardens, up to and including the cottage gardens of the early eighteenth century, were necessary for sustenance and survival as the source of food and herbs both culinary and medicinal. If any grass grew in those tiny closely planted cottage gardens, the goats ate it for lunch. The North American lawn as we know it has a more recent history, as well as a more prosaic one. Our fascination with grass has its modern roots in seventeenth-century France''s much-admired formal gardens of André Le Nôtre''s Versailles, with their tapis verts or small green carpets of grass, built into a tight structure of beds designed to prove that man was a better landscape architect than nature. This style was copied by the English until the eighteenth century, when William Kent and Capability Brown revolutionized landscape design: in their view, nature was a power to be embraced, not controlled, and soon the manor houses of England were surrounded with great greenswards of grass that swept right up to the front doors and off to the horizon.

These landscapes were considered natural, but in the end were just more cultivated lawn The Landscape Movement: Upper-Class Grass Capability Brown, in particular (his real name was Lancelot, but he was nicknamed Capability because of his constant reference to a site''s "capabilities"), like the grand vision. He spared no client''s expense to recontour land and uproot trees (even tearing down houses he considered unnecessary) to make smooth surfaces for carpets of grass, scythed, rolled, swept and manured into lush and perfect lawns. Sound familiar? The influence of the garden park is also evident on many of today''s large suburban estates, where expanses of lawn set off with trees seem to be the only treatment the landscape architect can envision for a vast space. This was the peak of the Landscape Movement in England, but like many other landscape styles it was accessible only to the upper classes, who had both the property and the money to care for such large areas of grass. This didn''t discourage immigrants to the New World, who brought this vision of endless lawns with them. Hopeful that it would reflect the riches and class such landscapes suggested, the most affluent among the colonists borrowed the approach for their new but more modest land holdings, despite the fact that conditions here did not favor the growth of the fine lawn grasses of England. Highly placed travelers to England also admired the style and brought it back to No.