Pete McMartin: Illogical statutes deem long grass ‘unsightly’

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A funny thing happened last week.

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On Saturday, a column of mine appeared in The Sun. The column was on grass. The weed was the garden variety you cut, not the psychoactive variety you smoke, and the weed in question was on a boulevard in front of my house.

Due to a unique feature of my neighborhood, which is the lack of sidewalks, all houses have boulevards adjacent to the owners’ front yards. It is the responsibility of the owners to maintain them. Through an urban reforestation program, the city encourages homeowners to plant trees on boulevards, and many, myself included, have done so.

Many have not. To discourage parking, some homeowners have put rocks, logs, or round trees in them. Some are paved or gravel. And in many vacant homes, absentee owners have let the weeds take over.

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For several years, I tried to plant my boulevard with wildflower seeds, without success. They did not thrive under the trees he had planted there. So, earlier this year, I mixed grass seeds with wildflowers. The grass took, and in spring it was knee-high. I liked the light type effect of it. I thought it was pretty. I liked the idea that insects and maybe a snake could find a home there. But mostly, he didn’t feel like keeping the lawn mowed anymore.

Modern lawns are biological deserts. They are environmental disasters that discourage wildlife and poison the soil and groundwater through excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides. Because they require the constant use of lawnmowers, brushcutters, and leaf blowers, they not only contribute significantly to CO2 production and global warming, but their noise breaks the quiet of residential neighborhoods. According to a US study, the results of which could be extrapolated to Canada, lawn care requires more time, expense, equipment, labor, fuel, and the use of agricultural toxins than factory farming.

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So I decided to let the grass grow.

Which brings me to the funny thing that happened.

I wrote the weed column several weeks ago, but it wasn’t until last Saturday that it appeared in the paper.

However, on Wednesday afternoon before the column ran, a uniformed police officer from the City of Delta showed up. He said the city had received a complaint that the grass was “unsightly” and that the small wooden stakes and barrier tape we had placed around the boulevard while the grass was being established were a safety hazard. The city’s boulevard maintenance charter, he said, agreed. He said he could not release the name of the whistleblower.

“And we just ask,” he said, “that because you have grass on your boulevard, you keep it 4 inches or less.”

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If he didn’t mow the lawn, he said, he could face a $250 fine.

“So long grass is considered unsightly?” I asked.

“In this context,” he said, “yes.”

He seemed like a nice guy, polite, not at all officious: a civic employee just doing his job. I even felt some sympathy for him, given the complaints and aggrieved members of the public he must invariably deal with as a charter official.

But he couldn’t understand the logic of an ordinance that considered tall grass and wildflowers unsightly, while boulevards with gravel or paving or logs or round trees or boulders were perfectly “attractive.”

I also couldn’t understand the obsession with mowed grass, especially in this day and age. Lawns were a medieval European invention of the English and French nobility, the only class in society that had enough money and indentured servants to keep their vast estates trimmed. A lawn meant wealth and power.

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In Canada, turf gained ground with the introduction of bowling, tennis, and golf here, but turf’s popularity soon grew beyond the playing field. With their own claims to wealth and power, the local nouveau riche aspired to the same claims that lawns conferred on the European nobility.

After World War II, the yearning for grass trickled down to the new urban lower and middle classes as well, especially with soldiers returning from war hungry for a home and a bit of greenery to go with it. It was no mistake that Levittown, one of the first large planned suburbs in the US, included established lawns with its pre-built homes, lawns that owners were required to mow by contract. The lawn became an ideal of voluntary conformity. During the 1950s and Cold War hysteria, lawns were even promoted as an expression of anti-communism, with homeowners fighting dangerous weeds and crabgrass.

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Today the residential lawn survives… well, for no reason, except, perhaps, a lack of imagination, an obsession with neatness bordering on anal retention, and a populace that has lost its taste for the bucolic. If we have to go back to the garden, as the song insists, a good place to start might be to remove the grass.

In any case, on Saturday morning, the day my column celebrated the uncut grass on my boulevard, I removed the wooden stakes and tape from the barrier and, fully aware of the irony of the situation, cut the grass. up to the knee. the bachelor buttons, the California poppies, Johnny’s shorts, and the lilies that grew there. If the city had found the boulevard unpleasant before, I wondered what it would think of it now. It looked like a bad haircut.

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However, something more unpleasant remained beyond the cut grass. I wondered who it was that complained to the city. Was it a close neighbor or someone a few blocks away who walked their dog by our house? They all became suspects.

And that, to me, was the really ugly part. It was the ugliness of the anonymous busybody who can’t knock on a door to air a complaint like neighbors should, who insists on uniformity and conformity, who is so wounded that he takes it upon himself to police every little aberration he feels defies. his sense of control, which unknowingly—or perhaps knowingly—fosters distrust among neighbors.

As specified in the city charter, my uncut lawn was unsightly. He could not see, however, what was truly ugly.

Pete McMartin is a former columnist for The Sun, he can be reached at [email protected].