Lawn Sushi

A local plant nursery—just a quick stop for a look…No. No, no. I do not need to buy any more plants.

But it’s like a candy store…just have to check it out. I’m looking for native perennials for my optimistically planned butterfly garden next summer. Anyway, I notice this truck in the parking lot.

Odd. A lot of rugs rolled up and piled in the back. Someone must be moving.

Only when I looked closer, of course they weren’t rugs at all.

They were lawns, rolled up as neatly as a California tuna roll. Ready to truck to a new site, a housing development somewhere. All you have to do is unroll it and there you are.

My friend Lilly used to work at a greenhouse. She says “We would get pallets of these rolls at the nursery. People would come and buy a strip or two to repair a lawn area. The funny thing is that when they stay rolled up like that for a few days, the grass begins to turn yellow. We then had to unroll them all over the parking lot to water and get some sun. When people bought them, we would roll it up and put it in their car.”

It’s funny, a lawn seems like the most natural thing in the world, a green stretch of nature among the housing lots. But a lawn is a human-made product, just like a rug.

A lawn is a crop-field, really, planted and tended like a field of wheat or soybeans, and as quick to disappear without constant human intervention.

Not that lawns are bad things, mind you. I like to lie in the sun, play frisbee with the dog (if only she would learn to catch the thing) and generally hang out on the lawn. A prickly field of weeds isn’t nearly as much fun to sunbathe on. And as one reader pointed out, where would worm-hungry robins be without lawns? A lawn—pesticide free, of course—is a great place.

It’s just not nature by any stretch of the imagination.