I want to sing a song in praise of meadows, but first let me say something about my suburban lot on a cul-de-sac in Metro Atlanta, which is the antithesis of a meadow.
My yard is like so many others, a street-facing facade constructed of a house, a patch of grass, and decorative plants—the American dream in a single photograph snapped from the sidewalk. And like most facades, this one must be diligently maintained in order to preserve the illusion.
There is the boxwood at the front entrance, a classic ornamental shrub that adorned many English estates, pruned to resemble cubes or spheres or sometimes borders for other landscaping features. The boxwood reminds me of the scene at the end of Terrance Malick’s film New World, when Pocahontas travels to England. As she walks in the gardens of a wealthy estate, the audience is meant to observe how the English have tamed the natural world through horticulture and landscaping, while her people have learned to flow with it—a clash of diametrically opposed worldviews. On my mini-estate in the Atlanta suburbs, only the largest boxwood nearest to the two Arts & Craft columns at the entrance has retained its orb-like appearance. The others are wildlings by comparison, unsymmetrical and free verse. The landscape company hired by the homeowner’s association is haphazard in its pruning of my shrubs, and I lack the aesthetic militancy or concern for neighbors’ opinions to do any further trimming myself. If it were up to me, I would let it all grow out into a messy, glorious jungle-scape, but no one is asking my opinion.
The house was built fourteen years ago on the last empty lot in a small neighborhood with seventeen houses. The lot was mostly a pile of construction fill from the building of my neighbors’ houses. When the first fourteen houses were finished, the construction company went out of business (this was 2009, right after the real estate crash). Another company arrived on the scene to build houses on the remaining three lots, including mine. There were decisions made about the shrubbery, but I barely remember making them because my wife was six months pregnant with our daughter at the time, and that entire Spring is a blur in my mind. We ended up with two Chinese Arborvitae (Platycladus orientalis). These evergreen coniferous trees in the cypress family, native to China and Korea, stand like conical green spires at both corners of the house. Wrapped around the spire nearest to the entrance is a False Cypress shrub, pale green in color. There are also two bedraggled, shapeless azalea bushes. The single silver maple tree in the front yard appears to have not grown an inch in fourteen years, which is very unusual for this kind of tree.
I have nothing personal against this wall of shrubbery, but these plants are a daily reminder that the vast tangle of American suburbia is like an invasive species. A species is “invasive” if it is introduced to an existing environment and then overwhelms and harms it. These shrubs and trees from Asia and Europe are “natural” to the extent that they have leaves, require water to survive, and perform photosynthesis, but they have been deployed by humans in this landscape in a wholly unnatural way.
Another word perhaps explains suburbia, this one from science fiction stories: terraforming. Suburbia is best described as a type of terraforming that bombs out an existing environment in order to replace it with another.
This is technically my property, but I possess no sense of spiritual ownership, no connection to the land. The yard is part of the packaging of this lifestyle, nothing more. I’ve met suburbanites who obsess over their yards, taking great pride in their appearance, and they are always disappointed by my laissez-faire attitude, because they expect me to share in their enthusiasm for suburban aesthetics. I do not. It’s true, I could spend more time trimming and edging and chemically enhancing the foliage on my property, but I would merely be primping the details in a postcard image of my life. I prefer wild meadows buzzing with insects and overflown by swift birds, dotted with wildflowers and fragrant with the woodland scents our ancestors knew for many thousands of years before the first leaf blowers and law mowers arrived on the scene. A lawn is not an improvement on the meadow; it is the crudist imitation of one, an impoverished substitute for the rich biodiversity of the planet, which is being relentlessly terraformed into housing, retail, fast food, shopping centers,
I walk my dog Willa in a nature preserve not far from my house, which is a big 112-acre meadow bounded by woods on three sides. She is a shaggy, excitable dog who looks like a tan-colored Benji and drags me behind her, darting at every new scent or sound coming from the tall grasses. She is the truest fan of this place. The wooded areas are mostly new forest, and there are signs that it was once a farm. There are rotting sections of wooden fencing and metal posts, with pieces of rusing barbed wire dangling from them. In one area, there is a large, sturdy wooden post that looks like it was set afire sometime in the past. Nearby, a single length of wood fencing juts out from the trunk of nearby oak tree as if it has been stabbed into the trunk. The tree has outlived this patch of human enterprise and is now gradually digesting a piece of it back into itself. I take comfort in that.
The meadow is a pointed contrast to my yard. It is a thicket to be sure, uneven and dense with variety, an unruly tangle of life that falls far short of civilization’s demands for geometrical symmetry. To walk in this meadow is to revel in the finest brushstrokes of fauna. The wildflowers bloom and fade with regularity, splashing new colors across the field each week.
On this mid-October Saturday morning, the field is sprung with goldenrod everywhere and dotted with patches of white heath aster, their tiny flowers catching the sun in splashes of brilliant white. A stiff breeze is blowing through the meadow, bending the grasses towards me as I walk. On both sides of the trail, I can hear the soft hissing chirp of crickets in the grass and the popping of small grasshoppers as they leap around the field, some of them snapping to the ground at my feet. I pause to take a picture of a brilliant orange Gulf Fritillary butterfly that has lighted upon a sprig of pale white Sweet Everlasting.
I revel in the sensation of being lost and overwhelmed by this landscape if even for just an hour a day to remind me of my proper place within it, not as a spectator or a jogger or dog walker or a guy listening to a podcast on his earbuds but as a living being whose physical essence mingles with oxygen and nitrogen and pollen and the musk rising from Willa’s shaggy coat and the floral essence from thousands of blooming flowers caught in the breeze. My other waking hours will be filled with the System’s insidious propaganda, trying to convince me that I should shape the world with my will, but during this most sacred hour, I am enveloped in an altogether different message.
As I walk in this meadow, I sometimes try to imagine an alternate kind of relationship with the land. The meadow is part of a larger nature conservation area that includes a "Cherokee Garden," which is managed by the master gardener extension program at the University of Georgia. This garden showcases all of the plants used by the Cherokee Indians for food, medicine, war, and shelter—400 in all, including an impressive display of the “three sisters,” the Cherokee method of growing corn, beans, and squash together. I pass through this garden on the way to the meadow, and each time I am reminded that not long ago in this part of the world, the humans who lived here had a very different relationship to the land, one in which private property was an unknown concept and there was no government to decide how land should be used and apportioned and the land and all of its biodiversity was imbued a powerful sense of the sacred. I do not say this to glorify the Cherokee or Native American culture in general but rather to illuminate the fact that alternatives to this suburbanized lifestyle were and are possible. Indeed, the modern suburbs have a rather short history that can be traced back to the end of World War II. For more than a hundred years before that, this part of Georgia was mostly an agricultural area inhabited by white farmers and plantation owners. Before that, for a much longer stretch of time, the people who lived here shared an understanding of the land that is inconceivable to modern Americans.
The Cherokee believed that all beings were related, including nonhuman beings, and that all life was woven together in a web of interdependence. I often wonder what it was like know the land intimately in this way, to care for it, to feel a sense of belonging to it. To have a relationship with it? My relationship to my property is nothing like this. I am indifferent to it. It is a habitat for one very small American family, and an expensive one to maintain. I care nothing for the grass or the shrubbery, which may as well be made of plastic for all the difference it would make. It is a strange, strained relationship, tinged with economic anxiety.
The fear of losing one's home is ever-present among many Americans, an anxiety justified by recent history. Following the 2008 crash of the housing market, 10 million Americans were displaced from their homes. According to a CNN Money article, 3.1 million American homeowners filed for foreclosure in 2008 alone. Many Americans were traumatized by these events, leaving a permanent scar in the nation's collective memory. The fragility continues to this day. Forbes Magazine reported in 2023 that 78% of Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to save or set money for retirement after the bills are paid.
This anxiety is pervasive, and for many of us, it defines our relationship to the land. We are daily reminded that the land under our feet is not ours, but rather owned by a bank. Fail to pay your mortgage on time and you will be booted from your house and property. The entire system is weighted to support the bank's right to foreclose on your house. And even if you do own the property outright, there are property taxes and municipal taxes and utility bills and the cost of home maintenance and a dozen other smaller bills that add up to constant financial pressure. In the suburbs, homeowner’s relationship to the land is defined by his/her ability to keep money flowing into it. If you cannot do that, you are out of luck.
I loved and lost a meadow once. The backyard of our house in New Jersey butted up against a large farmer’s field that had gone fallow, overgrown with tall grass, milkweed, and honeysuckle. The field was home to a menagerie of wildlife—chipmunks, squirrels, robins, and killdeer among them. Monarch butterflies migrated through the field in September, attracted by the milkweed. In the summer, the field was buzzing with insects, most notably the carpenter bees who nested in the cedar rail fence around our backyard. My earliest memories are of playing in this field with my friends. It was a paradise to our eyes. But suddenly one day, the earth movers and backhoes and steam rollers arrived and began tearing up the place. Then the construction crews arrived to pore foundations and dig basements. After this, the incessant hammering began, and the walls began to go up. In less than a year, the meadow was gone, replaced by dozens of single-family houses.
What should I make of my bulldozed meadow? Society gives me a ready-made answer: You were a five-year-old boy, completely ignorant of the ways of the world. You learned (or should have) that sometimes meadows are sold to developers who build new houses, and why shouldn't they? Everyone needs housing. You are upset because you were too young and naive to understand the rules of private property. If a person owns a meadow, he is perfectly within his rights to sell it to anyone, even a developer who wants to build houses there.
It goes without saying that I have never acclimated myself to this capitalist logic. Even at the tender age of five, I knew that the meadow’s true value was incalculable in the real estate market, because capitalism can think of no other use for land but to buy and sell it or rent it or extract value from its natural resources or turn it into some kind of profitable amusement.
A healthy meadow is an entire ecosystem. On every walk through my meadow in Marietta, I see pollinators like bees and butterflies flitting around the flowering plants, but I can hear the larger army of insects all around me, a barely perceptible buzzing emitted from the field at large. Birds nest here, most notably bluebirds. Meadows are carbon sinks and net producers of oxygen. The real value of a meadow is only understood by people who believe some modern version of what the Cherokee believed, that all life is interdependent. A meadow teaches this lesson every day, if we can only pay attention long enough to hear it.
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