NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

By: Annie Nocenti
November 8, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of (one of) their nerdy obsessions.

MOSS

My first job as a tiny tot was to uproot lovely yellow dandelions for five cents a plant. Everyone in suburbia wanted a flawless green lawn. Yellow was an aberration to be yanked out. As a child, something bugged me about this conformity of green. It felt suffocating. Children seem to have antennas tuned to anxiety, they resonate with things they cannot name or articulate.

Immaculate green grass commands other plants and colors to bend, contort, shrink, and submit to its dominion. The perfect lawn has an army of warriors fighting for it, fortified with fertilizer spray guns, snaking water hoses and loud, gas-spewing lawnmowers. Is the environmental wasteland of the manicured American lawn due for retirement? Grass isn’t the problem; notions of perfection are. Neighbors side-eye a messy lawn, along with anything else outside the norm.

During our pandemic year, trapped on my land, moss became an obsession. I bought it, planted it, dug it, transplanted it scattershot across the yard. The covert, damp, stealth nature of moss spread quiet and slow under the grass. I bought eco-seed – fescue grass which grows only to a certain height, then flops over. I planted swaths of it — it resembles a field of little toupées. My fantasy is for moss, edibles, wildflowers and eco-creepers to spread into a maintenance-free lawn that will never again feel the violence of the blade.

How did the greening of America get it so wrong? My grandmother used a scythe to cut the hay in her fields to feed her animals, a century ago. I still have that scythe, once a wide blade, now worn to a thin curve by her labor. I love this scythe, a weapon in an unwinnable war.

I notice buzzcut lawns in film … but only when they’re being mocked. The opening shot of Election, with the annoying spit spurt spatter of a water sprinkler, perfectly sets the scene for an entire film about small protests against the rigors of conformity. The opening sequence of Blue Velvet, with the whitewashed picket fence, waving firemen, then the dive down into a carnage of beetles hidden in the grass, is a tiny rebellion, pushing up under subservience.

Why yank dandelions? They have edible leaves and the yellow flowers beckon to pollinating bees; a fruitful little plant/bee/human ecosystem. Ignore a field, and it thrives with edibles and wild flowers –wild strawberries, echinacea, wild onions, garlic mustard, fiddleheads, morels — a lush, natural symbiotic sweep.

Recently, news stories are popping up, deriding “nonfunctional turf” – the grass along highways, in the dead-zones of office parks, development malls. In-between grass, useless grass. Grass that is only walked on when fertilized, mowed and watered. Grass that needs endless labor for it to exist. Grass is the green of money, of capitalism, the green of envy and greed. Does the weeding, fertilizing, watering, mowing labor needed to attain green perfection guarantee happiness? We are planting ourselves, not the grass. In the end, is rebellion against unattainable perfection healthier? My personal war against lawn monoculture has blurred into a war against conformity – perhaps a turf staked way back in childhood.

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NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

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