Lawn Mowers.

friday's episode of engines of our ingenuity was about lawn mowers. from the transcript:

Today we burn a half billion gallons of gas a year powering rotary mowers. We pour tens of thousands of tons of chemicals on our lawns. Lawns reflect a 200-year-old Romantic dream of fusing ourselves with nature. Yet that very dream now poses a major threat to the nature it so lovingly celebrates.

What a crowning irony! We so want the loveliness of nature that we put nature under assault to have it. We lay ourselves open to that sort of thing when we take our technologies for granted -- when we let them slip into invisibility.

darin and i (okay, mostly darin) use a scotts reel mower. i love that it doesn't smell of gasoline and the only sound it makes is a very hypnotic "snick-snick-snick" as the blades turn.

we also don't use herbicides or pesticides or fungicides or other chemicals in the yard or garden. everything looks nice and green and i believe we have more "good" bugs, lizards, toads, frogs, snakes and birds than we would have if chemicals were used. i like knowing that my plants aren't coated in chemicals.

interesting, somewhat related links:

• history of landscape architecture (kenneth helphand, university of oregon)
  
• museum of garden history
  
• hearth & home: cutting the grass (andy wasowski, author of various books for texas gardeners)
  
• american landscape and architectural design, 1850-1920