Grass gets a trim in Albany under the hot sun on Monday, June 12, 2017.

Around Albany, I notice few powdered wigs, knee-length breeches or frock coats. But I see many lawns.

Ornamental lawns are a holdover of an 18th-century fashion inspired by French and British estates. When landowners go to the great trouble and expense of suppressing nature by creating close-cut, monoculture lawns, they contribute to the destruction of biodiversity. These lawns also say something about our relationship with the planet, and it’s something worth exploring.

Let’s start by considering lawns’ original name, “tapis vert,” which means “green carpet.” The people who coined the term “tapis vert” evidently thought of the land as a floor, and therefore the landscape as a room: designed, decorated, controlled.

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What kind of person would want to carpet Mother Nature? The answer, in this country, is certain vastly wealthy, houseproud members of the Virginia gentry: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. They imitated European imperialists by installing tapis verts at their famous, sprawling Virginia plantations. As a landscape design, lawns were a status symbol -- idle land that nonetheless took labor to maintain. Whose labor? These two men, like many other rich, white men of their time, practiced chattel slavery, a fiendish institution from which they profited obscenely.

The men’s taste in landscaping matched their hearts: the suppression of other human beings, and the suppression of nature. And the glorification of wealth above all.

Today, our hearts may differ. But we thoughtlessly continue to follow a landscaping fashion that rich enslavers held up as desirable.

And “thoughtlessly” is key here. Even the University at Albany, which rightly prides itself on the diversity of its students and the quality of the art and science created by those students and their teachers, greets visitors to its uptown campus with a colossal lawn, a symbol of uniformity that contributes significantly to the destruction of Earth’s habitability and that emphasizes our disconnection from the natural world.

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What if Collins Circle were mostly meadow instead? I say “mostly” – still leaving room for frisbee and sunbathing. What if your backyard were mostly meadow?

We have other groundskeeping options. Let’s mow less often and less widely, and let’s talk to people about why we’ve stopped working so hard to suppress nature.

James Lyons Walsh lives in Albany.

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