Intro to r/BoomersBeingFoolish subreddit.

Boomer-Bashing is IN!

As a Baby Boomer, I don’t go looking for examples of the Boomer-bashing that seems ubiquitous these days, sadly.  I see it rarely on my Facebook or Threads feeds but to my dismay, can’t avoid it on the plant-related Reddit subs I follow.

(I landed on the subreddit /BoomersBeingFools seen above through search and now worry that the algo will populate my feed with that crap.) 

In the realm of gardening I found this bit of agism at /gardenwild: “Hey everyone@ I’ve got a stereotypical boomer neighbor who has the classic pristinely manicured lawn, some ornamental plants for decoration, etc./ I see him more often lately l0oking at our yard disapprovingly.”

And at /fucklawns I found “I hate the boomer mindset so fucking much.  My grandpa just killed a beautiful tree because it ‘makes a mess.’ (It didn’t)”

Another posted that “My neighbor (boomer)” did such-and-such bad things. How gratuitous is that parenthetical “boomer”?!

Responding to agism

My first attempt at responding actually met with some success – it made me feel better. I wrote “It really saddens me to see generalizations like yours about people my age. Remember, we were also big activists.  Some of us. But I’ll stop because defending my generation from insults isn’t good for my mental health. I’m going back to the garden.” To which the Boomer-basher’s reply included “I’m sorry that I used the term boomer implying every boomer.  It was a certain type who specifically hired a landscaper and got angry if it wasn’t perfect.”

(Dare I say if you lumped all members of any other demographic group with the behavior of its worst examples, you might be called racist.  In this case, “agist” works.

To another Boomer-basher I responded by bragging about the activism in the ’60s and ending with “How is it okay for seemingly enlightened people to be so agist?” That prompted no reply from the offender but I appreciated this from a kindred spirit: “TY for saying this. Am 77yo F.”

Here’s one more response I love, a correction to sweeping generalizations about generations: “I live in a neighborhood with a mix of retired people and people in their 30s and 40s, about half and half. All the retired people have taken out the grass; it’s only the younger people with lawns. I assume that’s because they are too busy with their jobs and lives to think very much about grass, or they have kids or dogs that they maintain it for.”

Who *should* we blame for the conventional, conformist American landscape?

If we were to blame any one generation of Americans, maybe it should be my parents’ generation – the so-called Greatest Generation. That thought sent me looking for photos of gardens created by my mother, an avid gardener born in 1917 and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. 

This was where I grew up in Bon Air, Virginia, seen in the top photo on a recent visit, and below that, backyard fun in the ’50s. (We took photos of people, not plants.) We never took photos of the large veg garden or the long borders of roses and who-knows-what, but yes, the convention of front lawns and foundation shrubs was on display in the front.

No matter what plants my mother grew there, this yard was a wonderful yard to grow up in. It even had unlandscaped areas we could build forts in, bury treasures in, be a kid in.  

Our second home in 1966 (L) and 1970 (R).

But it wasn’t to last. When I was 15, at my mother’s urging, we moved to an upscale neighborhood in Richmond, where both front and back yards were formal and there was no space for growing food. Or for a cheap little swimming pool, like the one we left behind (seen at the end of this post). Or enough flat lawn for badminton, our favorite family sport, along with games in the pool. 

(Off-topic but funny to me is how much my style changed from high school to college – from frumpy and slouched over to hippie chick! And I made that pink mini-dress myself.)

Moving to a new, no-fun yard wasn’t the worst, though – I’d been enrolled in a very snotty high school where I was miserable, a sentiment I may have been expressing in this photo of me in the back garden.

On the right is the only photo I have of my mother gardening; she doesn’t look very happy, either. 

You know what the new garden WAS good for? My sister’s 1971 wedding reception, and formal photos like this one. That’s me, fourth from the left.

So who/what to REALLY blame?

For a historical perspective, and recognizing that lawns are the dominant feature of the conventional American garden, I turned to Ted Steinberg’s 2006 book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn. He outlines the real causes and inspirations for the type of American landscape that’s now so reviled.

In 1875, Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, a planned community outside Chicago that imposed 30-foot setbacks from the road – and established large open front lawns as the new ideal. Michael Pollan (who calls Olmsted the “Father of the American Lawn”) described it in his 1989 article “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns”:  “Each owner would maintain one or two trees and a lawn that would flow seamlessly into his neighbors’, creating the impression that all lived together in a single park.”

In 1870 Frank J. Scott published “The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds,” which Michael Pollan calls “a book that probably did more than any other to determine the look of the suburban landscape in America.”

Developers! Notably Joseph Levitt, creator of Levittown and other planned communities. “Only with the housing boom following the second world war did the idea of perfect turf become a national preoccupation“ (Levittown was built between 1947 and ’51.) “Levitt and sons invented a mass-produced landscape to go along with its ready-made housing. Levitt himself was an avid gardener who used to personally inspect the state of Levittown lawns and gardens…A covenant to the deeds of Levittown required that grass must be cut once a week between April and November. Levitt wrote that ‘a fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitant as good neighbors, as desirable citizens.” He recommended that lawns be fertilized five or six times a year. Source.

The Scott Company, which launched a lawn care magazine in 1928, pushing its seven-step lawn care program using its many products.

Gas-powered lawn mowers entered the U.S. market (from the U.K.) in 1919.

In the 1950s and ’60s the post-war technology of the “Green revolution“ saw the launch of products like Seven insecticide and Daconil fungicide, which “gave home gardeners the upper hand against pests and diseases.” (What a way to put it! – from this source).

So it was in the post-WWII era that lawns and foundation plantings – all open to the road, no fences or hedges –  became the ideal in the U.S.

Should Boomers have rebelled against conventional yards?

I hope I’ve convinced you that Boomers did NOT create the type of garden that’s so reviled in today’s eco-gardening messaging. And before you criticize Boomers for not challanging the gardening style or practices now known to be harmful, remember we were busy taking on the Vietnam War, racism and sexism.

Also, to judge us by what was known at the time, environmental awareness was very new, starting with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which focused on the use of pesticides. It was decades more before concepts like lawn replacement and gardening for wildlife entered the conversation.

In this 1942 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, homeowners were urged to use some of their lawn space for growing food.