Are you suggesting that we won’t eat our Arborvitaes?

Because having a big yard of grass that you have to mow every week while using up gasoline is the American dream and a flex for some reason.

Grass lawns as a concept came from Europe as a symbol of wealth. If you could afford a large green lawn, you were likely rich.

We do? At least where I live I see mango trees all over, saw a longan the other day, there are loquats all over too, and until citrus canker there were orange trees in most backyards. At my old house we had loquat, tangelo, lemon, lime, carambola and bananas, and a papaya tree.

At this house we have lemon, lime, Valencia, and sugar bell citrus trees, a fig (all of these are dwarf trees) and a vegetable garden but all are in back. In front a small lawn, a few ornamental plants and sometimes I plant bulb fennel out there.

That will depend on what type of Home Ownership Association the house is on. Some of them mandate a well kept grass lawn and you get fined for not moving.

We do. Obviously not everyone can But I wager the number of Americans growing something edible on their space is decent. Usually it’s easy stuff to grow, or someone’s favorites.

Thinking about it and counting in my head I actually know dozens of people that grow tomatoes personally. They grow easily in large quantities in relatively small space and all taste better than store bought.

Citrus has been pretty plentiful my entire life too. Lemon trees especially.

There are places where they have trees all around their houses. Like in California, where they just had been more fuel to the fires.

I mean some of us hate grass so much we started a huge reddit community about it that made it’s way too lemmy.

https://slrpnk.net/c/nolawns

As someone who lives in an ex-industrial city (Birmingham Alabama), I’ve always been worried about air pollution and tainted soil (there are superfund sites nearby). I feel like every thing would have to be above ground and covered. That seems like a lot of work. Should I be worried?

In, or in the yard of? We’re not talking about indoor houseplants, I assume.

If outside is what you mean, it goes back to the days of aristocracy. Having land you don’t use for food was a form of conspicuous consumption, and you had sports for the elite grow up around stretches of short grass as a result, like golf and polo. The former is still synonymous with the well-off, even.

Then you have to skip ahead to the 1950’s and 60’s in America, where the “mid-century modern” philosophy of urban planning gains prominence. The idea was to get people out of the crowded, Victorian-style slums, which we might find quaint in hindsight, but at the time were very stigmatised. This extended to a certain disdain for cities and buildings in general, even - more nature was better. So, where do you put people? In tiny little rural estates modeled on the ones popular with aristocrats, separated by zoning laws from the other sections of the city.

The vision was that people would get home from their 9-5 jobs in the commercial-only zones in their very own car, and would hang out outside enjoying their government-mandated leisure time. The urban planners of the time probably pictured a giant croquet course going up and down a residential street, and the all-white 3.5 kid families that live there sitting outside on lawn chairs, playing friendly games against each other. These “white picket fence” suburbs had lawns, then, because you couldn’t have semi-rural domestic bliss without them, according to some architects who graduated Harvard in 1920.

In practice, of course, none of that happened. Like so many other tidy ideas it failed to predict how the general public would interact with it. I’ve been around plenty of places like that. You know the names of your neighbor, but not much else about them, and the people a few doors down are suspect of being pedophiles or violent drug dealers. That fence line is sacred, each house becomes an island, and you’re frightfully dependent on driving to get anywhere you can do basic errands. And that’s not even getting into the racial issues that came out of it.

Now, in the 21st century, people assume houses have always had lawns, and messing with that formula irritates the local NIMBYs. New ideas eventually become rigid tradition, and as always it falls to the next generation to question the way things are done. Hopefully we will, but it will take a moment.

A lot of people are secretly cows and they actually eat that grass. Next time you say hello to someone and they respond “moo” you’ll know why.

Probably against HOA rules in many places.

Some do. Grass just got into the pop culture as the “proper” look for a residential property. But having fruit trees is amazing, especially in spring when they are all in bloom with flowers.

Can speak for everyone, but we do

This is why: https://youtu.be/EwVovJgwbJQ

Edit: Watch to the end, that’s worst than it initially seems, and it seems bad from the start.