Fritz Haeg Challenges Traditional Notions of Grassy Front Lawns

The Globe and Mail published an interview last Friday with visionary landscape architect Fritz Haeg, proclaimed enemy of the grassy front lawn and author of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. Here’s just a few tasty morsels from the inspiring article. To read the full version, click here.

For millions of Americans and Canadians, the front lawn is a sacred place. It symbolizes home ownership quite as forcefully as the house itself does. Kept vividly green and neatly clipped throughout the summer months, the open space between front door and street expresses for all to see the pride and care of its owners. Most importantly, it advertises a dream of prosperity and stability.”

For the past five years, Mr. Haeg has been teaming up with museums in several regions of the United States, and in London, to transfigure carefully selected front lawns into kitchen gardens. The results of this gesture have been written up admiringly in Time Magazine and The New York Times, and numerous design magazines in the United States, Europe and the Far East.

Mr. Haeg certainly doesn’t think what he’s doing is all that startling. “I’m not doing anything new. I think it’s hilarious when people write about the project as radical or crazy or new.”

But however ordinary and simple Mr. Haeg’s garden venture seems on the surface, it touches a deep place in the contemporary psyche, and therein lies its appeal. Many people are worried these days about the high cost of consigning millions of arable acres to purely symbolic use. Some are concerned about suburban loneliness and alienation, and share Mr. Haeg’s vision of the front yard as a new place of sociable micro-farming, a zone that could help reconnect neighbourhoods around a topic we’re all interested in: food.

“I think people are realizing that the systems that we’re trapped in, that we’re born into, now are leading us to places that are neither pleasurable nor sustainable. Food production, transportation, energy, city-making, building construction. It’s all inherently flawed and we’re all looking for ways to change it. The question is: Will we be able to do it in time?”

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