It comes suddenly, without warning, listening to the morning “tchic-tchic” of the automatic watering system or while the lawn is flooded, hose in hand. This vague feeling of unease tinged with guilt in front of the sown grass, rolled, fed with organic fertilizer, mowed, scarified, sown again, tirelessly watered but not very beautiful, in the end. You don’t want to admit it to yourself, but you can imagine it: an era has passed symbolized by the impeccable green carpet.
Suburban life unfolded on grass, between squared hedges and rosebushes in flower beds. The noisy mowing on Saturday, the barbecue on Sunday, the football mixing the children, the looks of the neighbors gauging the height of the blade of grass the moral qualities of the gardener, to the dandelion. The “glorious thirty” flowered the mown grass, modeled on the neat suburbs of American suburbs. The grass carpet extended that of the living room. Handling mower and chemicals, the father of the family offered the reassuring comfort of a domesticated nature.
The garden: a story of social domination
A plot of grass without cultivation, therefore not nourishing: in the Middle Ages, only monks, lords and kings could afford this luxury. The first lawns grow near the castles and stately homes. Having become signs of social distinction, they designed the complex French gardens at the end of the 17th century.e century. For Louis XIV, it is with a vast rectangle of grass (then called “green carpet”) that Le Nôtre emphasizes the perspective of the Grand Canal, in the park of Versailles.
The English elite of the 18th centurye century prides itself on recreating romantic pastoral landscapes in the garden, then copied by American aristocrats. The industrial revolution brought manual mowers and then motor mowers (1919), which were enormously successful from the 1960s, as well as chemical fertilizers and weedkillers. Leaving Europe, the grass is back there, recording the social rise of the suburban middle classes under American influence. But in Canada an anti-grass rebellion was born, which spread across North America in the 1970s: stop social pressure, long live the Freedown lawn, the turf of freedom, disheveled and without chemical inputs!
The millennium has changed, but the cultivation of turf has fine remains. In our region, the 12 million lawned gardens have created a market (seeds, tools, products, etc.) of nearly one billion euros, “ including 82 million for grass seeds intended for individuals, which are booming “, assesses Jean-Marc Lecourt, president of the Société française des gazons association. We would even border the “European shortage”, to believe the Semae, interprofession of seeds and plants. At the house of Gamm green and Garden, garden centers of the InVivo group, spring 2021, on the lawn seed side, was even more flourishing than that of 2019 (last possible comparison), supports Carole Fischel, who heads the plant sector there: “Investments for the garden have increased. However, the lawn remains an important element of its constitution. ” The first reflex of the home buyer who does not really know what to plant on his long awaited piece of land.
Carpet or cow grass
Green in cardboard box. Landscapers are doing their utmost every spring, although fall is more appropriate. “There is still work to be done to get people to accept something other than a uniform lawn, especially those over 40, sigh Olivier Planchenault, who practices in Champigné (Maine-et-Loire). Initially, customers all say they’re not waiting for a golf green. But as soon as weeds appear in the spring, they come back to me: “There are still weeds… How are you going to proceed?” The clover, the dandelion, the daisy, that makes cows grass, they paid for the grass, the one which is made mow on Friday before the arrival of the guests. For its flashy side. They get on all fours to look for the clover, they are obsessed with the notion of “own”. ”
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