Suburbia: the View from Scotland
Friday August 8, 2008
Categories: A Sense of Place
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 -...
Filed Under: suburbia
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
Recent Posts
About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
Subscribe
Archives
Blogs Worth Reading
- Front Porch Republic
- The American Conservative
- Patrick Deneen
- Conventional Folly
- The American Scene
- First Things
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Plank
- Eunomia
- Get Religion
- Postmodern Conservative
- Alex Massie
- The Corner
- Contentions
- Sharon Astyk
- Barry Ritholtz
- The Oil Drum
- Mere Comments
- First Principles (ISI)
- Brian Kaller
Very true. I remember your posting about the Armenian theologian who equated gardening with prayer; I found that very powerful.
The results of suburbia, however, are usually very different: miles after miles of the same houses and landscaping, and HOAs which prohibit anything different; not to mention that they are designed so that you can't get anywhere without a 10 minutes drive.
Don't know about the rest of the country, but here in California very few suburbanites tend their own lawns and shrubbery. That's especially true of the Suburbia of Suburbias, Orange County. Massie may be right about the dwindling number of Hank Hills out there, but from my observation the suburban ethic is about convenience and the presentation of (or trying to live up to) an expected front, not about a deep-seated need to cultivate the land or a continuation of the pioneer impulse.
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.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.