Out Of Africa

What happened to the man who was hit by a cow? Nothing, he was just grazed!!

One of the most ubiquitous landscape features gracing homes in north central Alberta is the prosaic piece of sod commonly called the lawn. Despite the disproportionate amounts of water, fertilizer and herbicide that are consumed in the grass propagation process and the time devoted to periodic clippings, turf grass adorns just about every household in the area.

Despite its modern popularity, the presence of lawns has been a fact of domestic life since antiquity. Chinese homes had lawns over five thousand years ago and there is even evidence that the Mayan and Aztec civilizations in Central and South America surrounded their temples with manicured grass.

Anthropologists suggest that the need for grass surrounding the abode may have been genetically encoded several million years ago when human descendants originated in the grasslands of East Africa. Since the savanna was “home” for the vast amount of human history, it is likely that the need for lawn has been hard wired into the psyche of the modern human.

In the middle ages, castles were not only surrounded by moats, but also by broad expanses of grass so that enemy forces could be identified at distances great enough that defenses could be mustered to repel an assault. To prevent sneak attacks, the grass was kept short by grazing livestock.

As the need to fend off invaders diminished with the advancement of society, the short grass surrounding these large estates was used to create games such as lawn bowling, croquet and tennis as diversions for the aristocratic elite.