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REDEFINING AMERICAN BEAUTY, BY THE YARD
By Patricia Leigh Brown
New York Times
July 13, 2006

http://www..nytimes.com/2006/07/13/garden/13lawn.html

LAKEWOOD, Calif. - When Cecilia Foti, a seventh grader at the Bancroft
Middle School here, was asked to write a ³persuasive² essay for her English
class in the spring semester, she did not choose a topic deeply in tune with
her peers -- the pros and cons of school uniforms, say, or the district¹s
retro policy on chewing gum and cellphones.

Instead, she addressed the neighborhood¹s latest controversy: her family¹s
front yard. ³The American lawn needs to be eradicated from our society and
fast!² she wrote, explaining that her family had replaced its own with a
fruit and vegetable garden. She argued for the importance of water
conservation, the dangers of pesticides and the dietary benefits and visual
appeal of an edible yard. ³Was the Garden of Eden grass?² she reasoned.
³No.²

In this quintessential 1950¹s tract community about 25 miles southeast of
downtown Los Angeles, the transformation of the Foti family¹s front yard
from one of grass to one dense with pattypan squash plants, cornstalks,
millionaire eggplants, crimson sweet watermelons, dwarf curry trees and
about 195 other edible varieties has been startling.

³The empty front lawn requiring mowing, watering and weeding previously on
this location has been removed,² reads a placard set amid veggies in oval
planting beds fronting the street.

The sign is a not-so-subtle bit of propaganda proclaiming the second and
most recent installment of Edible Estates, an experimental project by Fritz
Haeg, a 37-year-old Los Angeles architect and ersatz Frederick Law Olmsted.
The project, which he inaugurated on the Fourth of July weekend in 2005 in a
front yard in Salina, Kan., is part of a nascent ³delawning² movement
concerned with replacing lawns around the country with native plants, from
prairie grasses in suburban Chicago to cactus gardens in Tucson.

It is a kind of high-minded version of ³Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.² As
Mr. Haeg put it, ³It¹s about shifting ideas of what¹s beautiful.

³It¹s about what happens on that square of land between the public street
and the private house. It¹s about social engagement. I wanted to get away
from the idea of home as an obsessive isolating cocoon.²

The Fotis volunteered for the project after reading about it in early 2006
at treehugger.com, an environmental Web site. Cecilia¹s father, Michael
Foti, a 36-year-old computer programmer and avid gardener who raises
chickens in the backyard, was eager to put his environmental politics into
practice.

³I am looking to think differently about this space,² Mr. Foti said of the
family¹s once-placid front yard. ³I want to look outward rather than
inward.²

The delawning was accomplished over Memorial Day weekend by a SWAT team of
some 15 recruits who read about the project on Mr. Haeg¹s Web site
<http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden_main.html>. Mr. Haeg arrived armed with
three rented sod cutters, a roto-tiller and a dozen rakes and shovels, and
within three days the yard was transformed.

The new garden has caused much rumbling in the neighborhood, a pin-neat
community originally built after World War II for returning G.I.¹s where
colorful windsocks and plastic yard butterflies prevail. Some neighbors fret
about a potential decline in property values, while others worry that all
those succulent fruits and vegetables will attract drive-by thieves -- as
well as opossums and other vermin -- in pursuit of Maui onions and
Brandywine tomatoes.

But the biggest concern seems to be the breaching of an unspoken perimeter.
³What happens in the backyard is their business,² said a 40-year-old
high-voltage lineman who lives down the street and would give only his
initials, Z.V. ³But this doesn¹t seem to me to be a front yard kind of a
deal.²

In spite of its contemporary media-savvy title, Edible Estates is a
throwback to the early 20th century, when yards were widely regarded as
utilitarian spaces, particularly in working-class neighborhoods. As recently
as the 1920¹s and 1930¹s, decorative lawns -- which in this country date
back at least to George Washington¹s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson¹s
Monticello -- were still largely the province of the elite, according to Ted
Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve and the author of the new
book ³American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn² (W. W.
Norton). The yard was for putting food on the table, Dr. Steinberg said, in
the form of vegetables, goats, rabbits and small livestock.

It was not until the postwar period that the notion of the lawn as the
³national landscape² developed as a vehicle for upward mobility, with zoning
setbacks designed to encourage clover- and dandelion-free perfection -- ³the
living version of broadloom carpeting,² Dr. Steinberg said.

While backyards remained private, the front yard evolved into ³a ceremonial
space that appears effortlessly and without labor,² said Margaret Crawford,
a professor of urban design and planning theory at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design. ³In middle-class neighborhoods,² she said, ³the idea of
actually using the front yard is extremely unusual.²

Mr. Haeg, who was raised in suburban Minneapolis, now lives in a geodesic
dome in East Los Angeles with a subterranean sprayed-concrete cave worthy of
Dr. No. Covered in mouse-brown asphalt shingles, it dates to 1984; he found
it on the Internet in 2000. Soon after he moved in, he began cultivating
edible plants like kale and pineapple guava in his terraced garden, and he
surrounded the dome with trellises for grapevines.

Mr. Haeg is perhaps best known in Los Angeles for his Sundown Salons
<http://www.fritzhaeg.com/salon.html>, which transform his three-level,
shag-carpeted home into an alternative cultural space that attracts artists,
other architects, recent M.F.A. graduates and assorted gadflies. The theme
and tenor of the once-a-month gatherings, which began shortly after he moved
in, have varied; they¹ve included traditional literary gatherings as well as
gay and lesbian performance art and all-night knitting and ³make your own
pasta animal² sessions.

Mr. Haeg has taught at several colleges, including the Art Center College of
Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he oversaw his students¹ design and
construction of Gardenlab, a campus community garden, beginning in 2001. He
is now designing a house for a film executive in the Silver Lake section of
Los Angeles and a rooftop garden for an apartment complex in downtown Los
Angeles.

Mr. Haeg selected Salina as his first Edible Estates site for its heartland
symbolism -- it is close to the geographic center of the country -- and
found his first subjects, Stan and Priti Cox, through the Land Institute, a
Salina-based organization dedicated to ecologically sustainable agriculture,
where Mr. Cox worked as a plant geneticist.

³I didn¹t feel any emotion,² Ms. Cox, 38, said of her defunct sod expanse.
³It was monotonous. Now my senses are stimulated.²

Mr. Haeg is planning seven more Edible Estates sites. (Coming soon:
Baltimore and Minneapolis.) Though he lacks training in landscape
architecture or horticulture, he has been shrewd in his recruitment of
plant-literate people with sunny, treeless front yards.

So far each ³estate² has been planted to reflect its region: the Cox garden
in Kansas is heavy with okra and corn, with a smattering of bitter gourd,
pimento and curry trees in deference to Ms. Cox¹s Indian roots. The Fotis¹
yard in California is resplendent with pomelos, oranges, mandarins and other
citrus fruit.

Mr. Haeg regards the Edible Estates project as something of a manifesto. He
fantasizes about setting off a ³chain reaction² among gardeners that would
challenge Americans to rethink their lawns -- which he insists on calling
³pre-edible² landscapes -- though he knows the chances are slim. Still, he
wants to make a point.

³Diversity is healthy,² he said. ³The pioneers were ecologically-minded out
of sheer necessity, because they had to eat what they grew. But we¹ve lost
touch with the garden as a food source.²

What is theoretical for Mr. Haeg, of course, has become everyday reality for
Michael Foti, who must live with his edible estate and arrive home from a
long day at the office to prune and weed and smite caterpillars into the wee
hours -- without pesticide, he is quick to note.

Mr. Foti is taking the garden one day at a time, A.A. style, a bit uneasy at
the thought of waning daylight. The biggest pest, he noted, is ³inertia.²

³We sometimes joke that it¹s the garden that ate our marriage,² he said,
then added wearily: ³I do feel a certain pressure not to fail. The whole
neighborhood is watching.²