Why do Americans have lawns? They inherited them from English traditions. The when and where of the first American lawns could perhaps be said to predate colonization with the grazing of buffalo on the prairie, but the concept of a lawn as an extension of the garden was born in Medieval European times, perhaps as a religious expression, simulating Christ, a sheep herder.
Not much more than a meadow in the garden of a castle, of wild flowers and herbs, growing closely together, or wild grass constantly grazed by animals and livestock such as sheep, became similar to what we know today as lawns, all over Maritime Europe.
It was with the end of the war of the roses and the rise of the Tudor Dynasty, that the English lawn became a place to be loved and admired.
English Renaissance Queen, Elizabeth I, or the Virgin Queen was fond of her own gardens, which displayed large portions of well-scythed and manually labored lawns.
Upon settling Virginia, great expenses were made by the British landowners to keep their own New English lawns on par with their native England; an exclusive gardening aspect of only wealthy estates.
Virginia survived due to the plantation of tobacco, which became a habit in England during the rule of King James, allowing these original American lawns to flourish in a very closely cut fashion, much like those of the Jacobean gardening era.
A symbol of status and power, the Jacobean style of gardening with closely cut and manually kept lawns became the envy of European gentry and set the stage for what would later evolve into our own American obsession.
The innovative English architect, William Kent from Yorkshire, created a style of landscape gardening that had never before been seen, by combining his love for the Palladian style with natural gardening techniques he created the English Landscape Garden design which seemed to flow out from the garden and into the landscape.
The most renown English Landscape Gardener was Lancelot Brown Capability Brown (Kents most accomplished protégé), who designed over 170 different parks, many of which can still be enjoyed today and are the keystone to understanding what direction American lawns took during the first half of the 19th century.
While in France and Italy, the lawn had become smaller and smaller, taking up less and less space in the garden, the American lawn continued to expand in the fashion of William Kent until the civil war, with American landowners becoming ever more arrogant in their own aristocratic games of pomp and exploit, using their expansive lawns as status symbols that in many cases rivaled their English counterparts.
The civil war was very hard on American English Landscape Gardening, and in most cases, completely wiped out whatever remnants of the old aristocracy had remained. A decent exception is the White House lawn, which is a nice example of what these pre-civil war lawns looked like.
Rabbits, horses, sheep and other livestock would graze in the forests of Medieval England to form tight swards, much like our modern lawn today, but the American climate proved unsuitable for English grass seed, and remained a gardening fashion economically restricted to the wealthy, slave and plantation owners until the 1870s when the mass production of push-mowers (an idea that had been around since as early as 1830) finally became available to the pubic at large.
