Alex Massie is spending his summer in the Scottish countryside, and getting in touch with his inner Hank Hill. Excerpt:
So, in that respect, the suburban lawn and garden seems a perfectly rational response, adapting an ancient human need - growing things and forging, in however small a fashion, some link with the land itself - to the needs and patterns of contemporary life in which such connections can often seem frayed or, worse, abandoned entirely.I think much of this must also apply to American suburban life too, most especially the advantages of size and privacy. It's the logical consequence of the deep-rooted American wish to lead lives free from interference from others. And, of course, at a certain level there's a cultural connection, however thin, between the expansion of suburban yards and building plots and the original pioneering spirit of the homesteaders, spreading out across the prairies and laying claim to their small patch of territory. In that sense, the young family that moves to a large suburban lot from the crowded inner-city is following a familiar, classically American, journey.
It's understandable that those of us fortunate enough to have lived in lovely cities or to have grown up in beautiful parts of the countryside might find aspects of suburban life strange and unfulfilling (or, in my case, find American suburbia a weird, yet fascinating, blend of the familiar and the deeply weird). But the people who live in the suburbs and tend their lawns and yards have good reasons to be there. They're doing their best with what they have.
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They're doing their best with what they have.
Oh, how condescending, and comtemptuous.
By the way, what is a Hank Hill?
Ann,
Hank Hill is an emblematic character from Mike Judge's animated series "King of the Hill." As one character notes of him, "Hell, Hank, you'd take a shine to Mussolini if he said nice things about your lawn."
Not all suburbs consist of vast McMansions surrounded by acres of blank, characterless lawns. Many are older (the one I live in dates back to the 1890s); quite a few sprang up after WW II and the houses are not that large. Nor were they always so stick-up-the-rear worried about lawns or tomato plants in the front yard; my suburb allowed horses, goats, rabbits, etc. until the late 1950s.
However, I think the huge McMansion-villes are blights on the landscape, and it's only fitting that many of them built in the past few years are sitting empty, slowly rotting away as the vines (eventually) cover them. Too bad so much farmland was destroyed to build them.
I would like to see something beyond the suburbs - small towns that allow small livestock, have community gardens as well as yard space for personal gardens, and allow people to sell their own eggs, produce, flowers, milk, etc. without interference. There's no reason why a suburban half-acre could not become a highly productive and fertile "producer."
I think that there are *two* very different suburbias out there. There is the housing development. "A place where they cut down all the trees and name the streets after them." And old-school suburbia, those 1200 square foot ranchers built fairly close together with plenty of parks nearby and no HOA. In the old-school suburb you will find pristine lawns, but you'll also find clothes hanging on the lines and vegetable patched out back. You won't see those things in housing developments.
"I would like to see something beyond the suburbs - small towns that allow small livestock...."
In Dallas, you can stable a horse if your lot is 15,000 square feet. My wife presumes there's a deed restriction or an HOA rule against it in our neighborhood, but I'm not so sure. That would be a lot of fun.
"Don't know about the rest of the country, but here in California very few suburbanites tend their own lawns and shrubbery. "
But even those who hire people to cut the grass and hedges still tend to some aspect of their yards.
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