Lately a lot of suburbs have been passing antimonotony ordinances. These are intended to prevent developers from filling up a subdivision with block after block of more or less identical houses.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Landscaping laws vary from village to village, but they all are intended to promote the creation of a landscape dominated by closely cropped swards of mostly alien grasses. The occasional tree is all right, and you can have shrubs and flowers if they are kept carefully pruned and trimmed and confined to beds around the edges of the lawn. The favored look is a miniaturized version of the English country estate. This look was created at the end of the Middle Ages, when British landlords drove large numbers of peasants off their land. What had been cropland was turned into sheep pasture. Left to its own devices, a herd of sheep can produce a passable lawn all by itself. The sheep keep the grass closely cropped and even provide their own fertilizer. And sheep droppings are not the dinner-plate-size heaps produced by cows. They are tiny pellets, scarcely larger than rabbit dung.
Chicago also has an antiweed ordinance, but here the issue is not so much the promotion of monotony as it is the maintenance of control. So we have a statute that is one of those Chicago specialties: a law written so vaguely that it can be applied to almost anybody the precinct captain doesn’t like. The law says you can’t have weeds on your property above an average height of ten inches. It does not define “weeds.” It does not say how “average” is to be defined. Is it average over a season? A plant that is 5 inches tall in June and 15 inches tall in August would have a seasonal average of 10 inches. Is that all right? Is it an average of all the “weeds” you have on your property? You could run into real problems here if you have a 20-foot ailanthus or a 15-foot mulberry growing along your back fence. You’d have to shave everything else off at ground level to make up the difference. If your property is part lawn and part “weeds,” can you factor all those three-inch grass stems into your calculations?
I should explain that I have nothing against lawns. They are great places to play croquet or volleyball. If you have toddlers you can let them lurch about the lawn without worrying about them tripping over something hidden in the grass. But I do think that. any child above the age of four would have more fun in a prairie than on a lawn.
The extremely shallow root systems also make lawns little better than slabs of concrete at holding water. When a heavy rain hits, the water heads straight for the nearest sewer, where it can cause flooding.
Flexibility has been the secret of humanity’s success. And we have means and knowledge far beyond those possessed by any indigenous culture. If we start asking the right questions, if we aren’t too rigidly bound by traditional ways of doing things, we might survive.
