Front yard America

Americans have a love-hate relationship with their front yards. Great care is lavished on keeping contiguous lawns neatly clipped and otherwise providing a public facade that is a respectable ornament to the neighborhood. A multi-billion dollar industry supports their efforts. On the other hand, the American front yard has endured onslaughts from a multitude of critics for a century, including landscape architects and designers, journalists, environmentalists and millions of weary homeowners. How this unique landscape style came to be is the primary subject of Front Yard America. Because the style does not come from the mainstream of landscape architects, the author first explores the challenges of studying something so anonymous in origin that almost no one described it until it was so commonplace that everyone thought it always was there. The typical American front yard has not always been there: before 1870 fenced yards were the rule, by 1890, the barriers were down. The causes of this revolution in the popular domestic landscape are complex, and Schroeder's examination includes the first detailed history of lawn mower technology, as well as original hypotheses about the conversion of an aesthetic dictum into a national style. Although there are intersections with such theorists as A. J. Downing, the front lawn rationale turns out to be largely commercial, the realization of the design is technological, the diffusion from coast to coast is without direction - and the genesis is in two subdivisions of Toledo, Ohio. Throughout Front Yard America Schroeder inquires into the functions, values and meanings that Americans have found in the domestic landscapes of back yards and front yards, walls and fences, porches and patios. The final chapters speculate on the future of the American front yard in view of changing economic, social, environmental and aesthetic factors.