Grassroots

Photo by Avery Hunsberger

My quirky Polish immigrant family never quite fit in with the rest of my upper-middle class white Canadian neighbourhood. As a teenager, at times this was torture. We had an iron fence, while everyone else had matching ones made from wood. My mother would swim and tan topless, much to the enjoyment of the family of boys with the tree fort that looked into our yard, and to the horror of their mother. If the neighbor’s kids came over for a sandwich, it would be pickle and pate instead of PB & J. The worst neighbourhood faux-pas by far however, was that my parents never looked over our lawn. In all the 10 years that I lived there, not once do I remember my family watering, weeding, or using pesticide on our lawn. While all the other dads were up early on a Saturday morning to cut the grass, my dad was instead off drinking vodka with his fishing pals at Columbia Lake (yes, Columbia Lake!) One time I was so green with envy over the neighbour’s toxic, but immaculate lawn, that I stole his pesticide use warning sign from his lawn, and put it on our lawn instead. These days however, while I’m still embarsassed by my mom’s fascination with Judaism (we are Catholic, but our dinner table centerpiece last Christmas was a menhorah) and my dad’s nostalgia for his communist days, I take some pride in knowing that my lawn was the greenest and cleanest of them all. While the neighbourhood kids might have been food sick from our strange European open-faced sandwiches, atleast playing on my lawn didn’t contribute to their risk of getting cancer.

Our society’s fascination with a perfect lawn is further reflected in British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey most recent project to cover the National Theatre’s Lyttelton flytower in grass seed.

Check out a video of the wall in the making here

This isn’t the first time Ackroyd and Harvey have worked with grass. I particularly found their 2003 indoor grass installation of the former Clare College Mission Church at Dilston Grove, in Bermondsey, London exciting.

All photos copyright of Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey 2003

Merging landsacpe design and fashion, the duo also designed a tiger-print grass coat in 1991 for the Lynx Anti-Fur Campaign by blocking light to certain areas of the growing grass. The grass produced chlorophyll and thus turned green if it was exposed to light, where as the areas that remained in shade stayed a bright yellow colour.