I recently committed an act of sabotage at one of the most revered landmarks in the United States, a transgression against my relatively new home of Washington, D.C. Walking across the National Mall, I tore open a packet of wildflower seeds — sky lupine, mountain phlox, coreopsis — and scattered its contents across the grass.
As I later learned, to little surprise, the seeds did not survive the regular visits of a John Deere lawn mower and applications of herbicide. No big deal. My purpose was pure protest, a symbolic objection to the bland, Kermit-colored expanse that dominates the epicenter of our nation’s capital.
Replacing the Mall with a riotous wildflower meadow stretching from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol will not only beautify what is surely our dullest national park but also signal to millions of visitors that the lawn culture it symbolizes is no longer feasible in a 21st century dominated by extreme weather, species loss and forever chemicals. Across the country, the millions of small, suburban versions of the Mall directly contribute to that corrosion.
Conceived by Washington’s master planner, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, in 1791, the National Mall was supposed to be “a grand, tree-lined avenue, flanked by embassies and gardens,” as The Washington Post put it in it superb history of the Mall. There would be a canal, too.
Today, there are no embassies here. Those are mostly on Massachusetts Avenue. There is a lovely, almost rural canal that doubles as a time machine to the 19th century, but it is two miles away in Georgetown.
Yes, the Mall is a site of important civic functions, but many of these — Martin Luther King Jr. announcing his dream of racial comity in 1963, Richard Nixon wading into a crowd of Vietnam War protesters on a spring night in 1970 and, somewhat less significantly, Fox News conducting an interview with then-President Donald Trump in 2020 — have taken place around the Lincoln Memorial, which I would leave untouched.
My focus is on the eight lawns between 14th Street, close to the base of the Washington Monument, and Third Street, where the U.S. Capitol complex begins — 18 acres of fields of blended bluegrass and fescue, featureless and flat. On several visits throughout the summer, I found these islands almost uniformly deserted.
The Beach Boys played here several times in the 1980s, but “Good Vibrations” would sound just as good at any one of Washington’s numerous other open spaces. Same for protests and fireworks. And there would be no change to the athletic fields on the Mall’s periphery.
For that matter, meadows can — and should, in my view — carve out space for promenading, solitary contemplation and gathering. Lounging in a secluded clearing ringed by black-eyed Susans is vastly more pleasant, in my mind, than sprawling on an empty plot as legions of tourists pass by.
Here is the American suburban ideal writ way too large. Lawns took up about 49,000 square miles in 2005, a NASA-funded study found. The U.S. landscape service industry was valued at over $105 billion in 2021. Big Lawn is no less formidable a foe than Big Oil or Big Tobacco, which is why an audacious gesture is needed on the most prominent lawn of all. To borrow from Ernest Hemingway, if we win here, we will win everywhere.
And what, exactly, would we lose?
Instead of a grassy monotone, imagine a jazz symphony of color and variety, buzzing with bees, thrumming with life: Mariposa lilies and Dutchman’s breeches, California poppies and Texas bluebonnets.
That is the kind of National Mall our young century demands.
We badly need — yes, need — wildflower meadows to begin replenishing ecosystems devastated by overdevelopment. At the same time, we have to urgently tame a lawn culture that, besides being aesthetically barren, wastes astonishing amounts of water, leaches chemicals into the soil and inhibits the flourishing of animal and avian species.
Margaret Renkl, a Times contributing Opinion writer, recently judged that the American lawn had become nothing more than a “field of poison.”
The wonder of wildflower meadows — with each of the eight main Mall lawns between 14th Street and the Capitol, for example, showcasing flora from a different region of the country — would surely draw tourists who otherwise use the Mall as nothing more than a connector between Smithsonian museums.
Some of those awe-struck visitors would invariably return to Iowa or Arizona and do what I did several years ago at my own Washington home, replacing a tired and unused swath of grass with perennials native to the Mid-Atlantic.
Sure, only a small fraction of visitors to the Mall may be moved to join the growing anti-lawn crusade. But even a modest share of the 36 million people who already visit the Mall each year would be sufficient to reimagine the status quo.
The Mall is not immutable. Once there were fish ponds at the base of the Washington Monument, known as Babcock Lakes. They were deemed “one of the most attractive and interesting features of the city” by The Washington Post in 1880 but are, of course, long gone.
The historian Christopher Lasch observed that our inherent faith in progress had blinded us to the very notion of limits. But between incessant wildfires and ubiquitous microplastics, we are coming up hard against the limits of modernity. We can have either a Yosemite or a nation of Mall-like front yards, from Bethesda, Md., to Pasadena, Calif. I doubt that we can have both for much longer. Lawns may be a 20th-century luxury we simply may not be able to afford in the 21st.
The properly shorn lawn was created as a psychic barrier between the public street and the private home in the suburban tracts that began to carpet the American landscape after World War II. Here, your property began and any collective commitment ended.
Objections are not new. “The land is too important to our identity as Americans to simply allow everyone to have his own way with it,” Michael Pollan argued in a prescient 1989 anti-lawn manifesto. Since then, the existential challenges of ecological disaster, coupled with a culture of social alienation, have made it all the more urgent that we rethink the way public and private spaces interact.
Wildflowers require relatively little effort to maintain, especially if they are perennials, which come back year after year. They are beloved by bees and butterflies, pollinators whose presence is critical to the ecosystem. And until we fully retreat into the metaverse, it is an ecosystem to which we also belong.
A 2021 study found that more complex lawns help cool temperatures, and research published this year described how meadows can clean city air. The mental health effects of meadows have also been studied, with encouraging findings thus far. I like to reap those benefits as my wife and I sit with gin and tonics in hand, watching bees buzz through bushes of lavender and Russian sage while the toddler “helps” by digging up carrot shoots from vegetable beds.
We can’t be afraid of change. And we certainly should not be afraid of wildflowers. They speak to the variety of the American experience, to the regeneration and hope that follow even the harshest winter of discontent.
The lawn, by contrast, only takes. Its supremacy has been sustained by a fiction we can no longer afford to maintain, especially in the heart of Washington.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
