In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to keep them properly maintained—under 12 inches—can even lead to jail time. Not unjustly, some blame landscape architects (in the name of aristocratic aesthetics) for helping to co-create this obsession, especially in the suburbs of the American Dream, where ideals were transplanted from the neatly trimmed tapis vert of Baroque gardens or the English landscape tradition.

Landscape architects are now well aware of how resource-intensive lawns are, and the war against the lawn has been underway for decades. The process of “ungardening” gained traction with the publication of The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession (1994) by Virginia Scott Jenkins, who traced the rise of the American lawn as a cultural phenomenon rooted in 19th-century ideals of order, property, and civic virtue. Jenkins examines how lawns became a symbol of middle-class respectability, shaped by prevailing social norms, technological innovations, and the growing influence of the garden industry. She reveals how this seemingly benign landscape feature enforces conformity, ecological control, and consumerist behavior—ultimately critiquing both the environmental costs and the ideological grip of the ‘perfect’ green lawn.

Following such authors, the lawn with its high maintenance has become almost hated, even blasphemous, for landscape architects. We could compare the lawn to asphalt; we’ve been trying to penetrate, uncover, and punctuate both surfaces to permeate them with something more biologically diverse, ecological, and unmask the past mistakes. There is a sense of pride when Timothy Morton explains his fight to rewild both the garden and the neighbours. Indeed, the lawn is the battlefield between the conservative and the progressive.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi’s recent book Lawn (2025, published by Bloomsbury, in the Object Lessons Series) intensifies the critique by expanding the conversation toward a more polyamorous, collaborative vision of the garden. Aloi places the lawn at the center of a “climate change controversy”—calling it “the emblem of privilege, the enemy of biodiversity, and the death of ecology”. This “cultural icon” is in urgent need of reculturing. The book opens with a prologue titled Turf Wars, where Aloi initiates us into his perspective, describing green yet dead fields of synthetic grass. It continues with Grasslands, a chapter that positions these often-overlooked ecosystems as “primordial” havens for biodiversity (humans included), now suppressed by a human-centric, anthropomorphized gaze, losing their grounds due to the spread of agricultural fields.

Each of the subsequent chapters—Yards, Pitches, Parks, and Golf Courses—concludes with the refrain: “Nothing to do With Nature”.

We engaged with Dr. Aloi in the following conversation.

Lawn reads like it was written in a single breath, propelled by a sense of utmost urgency. What new take on the lawn does the Lawn present (*We are listing below influential titles you mention)?

I’m so glad it feels that way! The book was written in just under two months, after many months of research. I truly enjoyed the process, especially writing it through the winter, when life slows down, the garden sleeps, and there’s space to let the words take root. A few people who have already read the book have told me how much they enjoyed reading it in one afternoon, all in one go. So, I guess that something about its immediacy and urgency is working at both ends, writing and reading.

The book emerged from my love for plants, my conviction that aesthetics plays an enormous role in our relationship with nature, and my belief that we need to radically re-educate ourselves in order to make a positive impact. I believe that no change is too small to make a difference and that we can all make a difference by actuating small changes. It feels especially empowering now, at a time when political leaders seem intent on erasing scientific evidence of the harm caused by corporations. In this context, enacting even small changes becomes a quiet but potent form of resistance. So, to me, Lawn’s most important new take is to invite the reader to action. Other previously published titles are more concerned in either celebrating the history of the lawn as an achievement or deconstructing its ideological root. Lawn engages with the subject from posthuman perspectives, capitalizing on recent literature key to the more-than-human turn in the humanities from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, or Reza Negarestani, among others. The purpose of Lawn is a call to action. Every spring we can make a difference by reducing the size of our lawns and rewilding bit by bit as a form detoxification from the lawn. It can be done, but it needs to be done responsibly. If we reduce the lawn we reduce the pesticides and the pollution. The impact can be substantial. As I say in my book: “no yard is too small to make a difference”.

*Influential titles for accompanying research:

The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession by Virginia Scott Jenkins (1994)
The Grass Is Greener by Tom Fort
The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot
Redesigning the American Lawn (1993) by Herbert Boremann, Diana Balmori, and Gordon T. Geballe
American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn by Ted Steinberg,
Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are by Paul Robbins,
Civilizing Grass by Jonathan Cane.

Lawns are highly consumptive, in terms of water, pesticide and energy intake they require.
The golf course lawn is, as you say, in every sense hyper. This “commodified pastoral” is an urban product, with the gaze of a landowner, and offering “escapism for the very rich”. It generates a potent image of capitalist order, one mirrored in other elite institutions—universities, corporate campuses, and private estates—coded by a Judeo-Christian ideology framing this power-matrix.

If we were psychoanalytical, could you describe typical profiles of lawn-obsessed individuals or institutions?

Well, this is a difficult question also because different psychoanalytical profiles can coexist in one person or institution. The “lawn-obsessed” individual or institution often performs a desire not just for order, but for dominance over the unpredictability of organic life and perceived disorder. At the individual level, one might describe the neurotic lawn-keeper: someone who derives psychological comfort from symmetry, shortness, and uniformity, where every blade clipped is a momentary victory over entropy. This subject may unconsciously equate tidiness with virtue, and weeds with moral lapse. Here, the lawn becomes a superegoic terrain: not just space, but surface: a projection of the self that must remain unblemished, eternally green, and silent. It is a mega-virtue-signaler.

At the institutional level, think elite universities, golf courses, or corporate campuses, the lawn speaks of clarity, honesty, transparency, rigor, discipline, and equality. These entities often embody what Freud might call a narcissistic structure, in which the expansive green field reflects a fantasy of self-sufficiency, permanence, and elevated detachment from the truth of the world they exist in. The lawn becomes a stage upon which ideals of legacy and control are enacted and naturalized: a timeless “civilized” frontier that displaces heterogeneity and Indigenous histories under the guise of classical decorum.

In both cases, the obsession with the lawn is a pre-emptive defense mechanism: a way of managing deeper anxieties about decay (internal corruption) and difference. The lush, obedient turf offers an illusion of mastery over climate, over soil, even over time itself. That’s why it has become the verdant lingua franca of so many institutions. But beneath that façade lies a constant hum of maintenance, of denial, and of unsustainable extraction. In this sense, the lawn is not just an aesthetic or ecological artifact, it is a psychic surface, as I explain in the book, the lawn is a symbol of repression deeply rooted in our collective unconscious.

The aesthetic values of the lawn spread through aristocratic garden representations, while its moral underpinnings emerged from a purist logic that linked untamed nature to sin. The first lawnmower, released in 1830, marks a pivotal moment in the rise of lawn culture—supporting settler-colonial and pastoral nostalgia, the taming of nature, and the reinforcement of masculinity within the domestic sphere. It ties into hygiene culture, technological pride, land ownership, and other practices of erasure.

Has a zombie movie ever awakened anyone? To paraphrase: your book is a zombie movie, and the lawn, a hypnotic device. So what now? What will the traditional masculine figure—the suburban dad, high on gasoline fumes—do in the age of robotic mowers?

That’s a brilliant question and metaphor. If the book is a zombie movie and the lawn is the hypnotic device, then the suburban dad—our sleepwalking protagonist—is facing a crisis not unlike the undead themselves: he’s beginning to stir. The age of robotic mowers offers a strange kind of reckoning. On one hand, automation perfects the dream of the lawn: effortless uniformity, eternal shortness, nature subdued without sweat. But on the other, it strips away the ritual of mowing as performance of control, of masculine labor, of weekend identity. Without the hum of the gas-powered engine, who is he?

In this light, the robotic mower becomes both prophecy and parody. It performs the very fantasy the lawn was always meant to uphold: total order, minimal wildness, self-cleaning surfaces. But it also reveals the absurdity of that dream. The suburban dad, once triumphant in his mastery over grass, now becomes a passive observer, displaced by a machine that quietly obeys a deeper algorithm of tidiness.

Perhaps this rupture will make space for something else. With no mower to push, no blades to sharpen, the question arises: what happens when maintenance ends and attention begins? What grows when the lawn is no longer clipped into silence? If zombie movies wake us to hidden systems like consumption, control, contagion, then maybe this one ends not in escape, but in germination. The lawn cracks. A dandelion blooms. The dad kneels, not to dominate, but to notice. And from there, something begins.

But it is also worth noticing that at least in affluent areas, more and more lawn owners have already turned to hiring landscaping companies who now take care of the grass on a weekly basis. Perhaps, in the age of social media, masculinity is performed and reaffirmed elsewhere, no longer in what we previously identified as a natural scenery but on digital platforms. In that sense, the patriarchal alienation from nature would be complete. It would have fully succeeded in actuating its plan of domination and nihilation.

Returning briefly to the zombie-movie metaphor, I also just want to say that Lawn has a happy ending! Or at least it points towards one. The door out of the haunted house is open brightly lit arrows point to the way out…

With California’s expected ban on gas-powered lawn tools, even the machinery will begin to lose its rumble. I recall a passage noting that parterre de broderie in Baroque gardens was designed for women to observe from the first floor—because they had, supposedly, nothing better to do. Why is it that the lawn is coded as technical and masculine, while flower beds remain the feminine domain? 

The lawn, in its clipped efficiency and mechanized upkeep, has long been aligned with masculine values: control, technology, order, ownership. The mower, especially the gas-powered kind, is a tool just as much as it is a performative object, signaling a form of suburban virility that hinges on noise, exertion, and mastery. During the 50s and 60s, the act of mowing becomes a weekly ritual of territorial assertion, often reinforced by patriarchal scripts of labor division and domestic pride. I think this stereotype is still alive but it is also less written in stone.

By contrast, the flower bed, especially the ornamental parterre, has been historically coded as feminine, decorative, and passive. The garden, in this formulation, became a gendered stage: men acted upon it, while women observed. It was aligned with gender logics that have slowly crumbled during the last century.

I think that younger people are less caught up in these stereotypes and that they are discovering the joy of gardening together, no general prescriptions, finding in the garden opportunities for community building and personal as well as collective growth.

As you point out in your book, lawns in parks can be understood as panoptic devices—tools of self-discipline enacted through reciprocal peer surveillance. While openness and visibility may evoke a sense of safety, that same visibility performs a mode of control. Olmsted’s iconic Central Park was designed to generate a dramatic tension between shadowy, overgrown areas—spaces where one might lose oneself—and expansive lawns that symbolized “a fictitious natural virginity.” In its original conception, the park’s lawns were intended for contemplation, not recreation or leisure.

Today, however, the lawn has become one of the most cherished typologies in public space. How, then, might we reimagine and re-engage with these spaces—beyond nostalgia, beyond obedience? Where to keep the lawn and where to ditch it?

Olmsted’s Central Park is a particularly rich example that I discuss in the book. Its great lawns, originally meant for contemplation, now host picnics, sports, protests, sunbathing: activities that blur boundaries between leisure, embodiment, and sociality. And yet, even in their liveliness, these spaces often reproduce the ideals they were built to uphold: order, uniformity, and a fantasy of unpeopled “virgin” nature. At heart, Olmstead was a painter who painted with plants and soil. In Lawn, I explore at length the enormous impact that landscape painting had on the landscaping of parks in major world cities. To paraphrase your question, you are in essence asking “how can we re-imagine a painting, essentially a two-dimensional space to be looked at as a three-dimensional one that we can inhabit?” It’s a hard one…

There’s also a tension here between idealism and practicality that we should not overlook. What makes lawns complicated is that they always symbolize multiple things at once. They are potent polysemic signifiers. In public space, the lawn is also simply a comfortable, safe, and practical green carpet upon which to lie and read a book, play, or have a picnic. These activities can become difficult or even impossible in meadows or prairies. The panoptic power is still at play even if the people enjoying the grass don’t actively think about it. And so are the other entwined ideological threads that make the lawn what it is.

One can, of course, still enjoy a picnic on a lawn without consciously endorsing the historical ideologies of control, surveillance, and aesthetic conformity that shaped its origins. But this does not absolve the lawn of its ideological history, it merely opens up space for more nuanced, subversive forms of engagement. Here, the contemporary artistic practice of spatial “activation” becomes particularly illuminating. Rooted in performance, installation, and socially engaged art, activation refers to the transformation of a site through lived, embodied, or community-based practices that shift the meaning of a space without necessarily altering its physical form.

When artists activate lawns, whether through ephemeral interventions, participatory rituals, or slow acts of cultivation, they loosen the grip of the site’s dominant codes. It may host performances that foreground community seed exchanges, or political gatherings that reassert collective agency over manicured space. These acts neither erase the site’s history nor pretend it is neutral; rather, they work with and against it, revealing its latent potentials.

Such activations demonstrate that space is never ideologically fixed. Even the most hegemonically coded landscapes like golf courses or corporate greens can be unsettled, re-scripted, and temporarily re-owned. The question is not only how a place was made, but how it is lived, felt, and reclaimed now. In this light, the lawn can be reclaimed not through nostalgic enjoyment or outright rejection, but through deliberate repurposing, transforming spaces of passivity into sites of dialogue, joy, care, and resistance.

To reengage meaningfully with these lawns, we might begin by rejecting the binary between total preservation and total erasure. Instead, we ask: what does this particular patch of grass do and for whom? Does it foster equitable gathering? Does it exclude by design or upkeep? Could part of it be returned to native meadow, forest edge, wetland, or food-growing commons? Could its openness become less about visibility and more about access; less about obedience, more about multiplicity?

Reimagination doesn’t require wholesale rejection. In some cases, the lawn can be recontextualized, transformed into a performative space for civic exchange, protest, ecological restoration, or ritual. In others, it should be allowed to vanish: its thirst, sterility, and colonial aesthetics replaced by dynamic plantings that support biodiversity, decolonial land use, and community co-creation.

However small a patch, every act of wilding is a contribution to more polyvocal, plural futurities. You point out that the wilded garden will likely not look “good” in every season—but rather, it will look different. Our designs, shaped by clients who expect year-round lushness and coverage, often clash with the temporal rhythms of more natural growth and plant life.

In the concluding chapter, From the Buffers, Back to the Garden, you emphasize liminality as an uncharted space with maximum potential and references a range of artists, practitioners, ideas, and struggles that contribute to shift how we perceive lawn typology.

The fight starts …

…not with grand gestures but with the modest refusal to conform: one square meter of uncut grass, a scattering of native wildflowers, a willingness to welcome decay and transformation. It begins when we relinquish control in favor of collaboration, when we cede ground to other species, to other rhythms, to other ways of knowing what a garden, or a future, might be. From the edge spaces and interstices, from the buffers and borderlands, new visions emerge: messier, less ornamental, but far more alive. In these liminal grounds, where lawn gives way to meadow, or monoculture yields to multiplicity, we plant not just seeds but new stories of resistance, care, and co-becoming.

Towards the end of the book (I’m giving away the ending of the zombie movie!) I propose a simple but radical reconfigurations of the garden in our mind which might just allow us to change our relationship with the land. I say: “Rethinking the very conception of land ownership will prove essential. Which land is owned in ways that always simultaneously entail the presence and benefit of others? Which land should never be wholly considered “private”, even if it is sold under such terms in a legal agreement? Gardens and green areas of all types should be regarded as perpetually belonging to all earthlings. The land that surrounds our architectures should never fully become one’s private property in the sense that it always is, more than any other indoor space, a communal life-crux, a shared, ancestral crossway toward which we have first and foremost responsibilities: to keep it fertile, healthy, rich, and diverse for
all—to retain its essential livingness intact, to foster it, and always, at all costs, to avoid spoiling it.

To me, this is the most important message in the whole book. Only by truly accepting this we can start to reframe our responsibility towards the land and the planet.