thority to what Afro- and Euro-southern women of most social classes had
created for many generations: privacy, security, and persistence.
Suburbs, no less than the densest cities, are arranged landscapes where
inattentiveness to maintenance leads inevitably to dereliction and dis-
grace. Gardens and lawns are as susceptible as houses. They are, like farm
crops, part of second nature—human-arranged and -maintained soils and
plant assemblages—as opposed to first nature, which is unarranged or
managed wilderness (of which there is little left on the earth). As a youth
in suburban Long Island, Michael Pollan defied his gardener grandfather
and planted his first flower seeds helter-skelter. After his seed had germi-
nated and arisen, he discovered that he could not distinguish his infant
cultivars from other, unwanted plants (i.e., weeds), and he lost his little
garden to more aggressive plants. Thereafter he took care to plant in rows
that revealed his intention and permitted crucial weeding. Pollan’s non-
gardener father, meanwhile, was an early rebel against that anchor of the
suburban yard, the lawn. He let it grow and, when family and neighbors
complained, mowed amusing messages in the grass. There have been few
of his ilk, though, while not only the lawn but theperfectlawn of one species
of grass became the tyrant of the entire nation, the South included. Here
is to be found the nexus of farm and suburb: chemistry.
The creation of, an ally to Allied troops in the tropical Pacific and
Asia during World War II, aroused interest in agribusiness and, combined
with successful development of better hybrids of cotton and grains and
both pre- and postemergent herbicides, made for a new and global capital-
intensive farming. Labor requirements were minimal, since a single opera-
tor sitting atop a giant new tractor pulling a variety of implements might
plow, cultivate, plant, and prevent weeds and insect pests. If strange new
unwanted plants or bugs appeared, there would be new herbicides and pes-
ticides to exterminate them. At the end of a crop season, the same opera-
tor, now driving a combine or other harvesting machine, could expect to
bring in a heavy crop free of trash, rot, and insect damage. Agriculture’s
old industrial ideal was realized—if only the owner-operator could pay his
huge debts.
Suburban America, emerging at the same time, was soon beneficiary
and victim of the farming revolution. Corporations, some new and some
the same as those catering to agriculture, rushed to tease a huge new mar-
ket into (almost) labor-free gardening and lawn keeping. The front yard—
the big, open one mowed and hand-weeded by men—could be sprayed or
dry-pellet-treated to slay those dandelions or dollar weeds before or after