Seed: Students for Education Empowerment and Development

In ancient times, all available land would have been used for agriculture, to grow food to sell or eat, and then in the Middle Ages, lawns looked like pasture fields from the Bible. It wasn’t until Tudor and Elizabethan Times that lawns became a social place for walking and gathering. At this time, lawns were made up of meadow plants. Then in the early 1600s during the Jacobean period, the close-cut English lawn became popular, and in the early 1700s, landscaped lawns were created. The design of lawns changed throughout the years, but one thing has remained unchanged: lawns have always been a symbol of status.

Only the richest of the rich could afford lawns. Only they could afford the maintenance of a well-kept English or landscaped lawn, after all, it was a labour-intensive combo of hacking and trimming and a healthy dose of watering that would keep lawns looking nice. Only they could afford the recreation and leisure time to enjoy the use of their lawns.

Lawns didn’t become popular in North America until much later. At first, lawn seeds from England weren’t suitable for the harsher climate, and grasses native to North America weren’t appropriate for tidy lawns. Finally, after a collaboration between the US Department of Agriculture and the US Golf Association, a good grass seed was found and English-style lawns could be grown as desired.

Still, lawns didn’t become as massively popular as they are today until just this past century. Garden hoses and then sprinkler systems were created to make watering affordable and easy. Lawn motors were invented so they could be trimmed—without the use of grazing animals. With these inventions, lawns were no longer limited to the rich and richest; everyone could afford this status symbol—and now there are even city bylaws stating that your lawn must be of one single grass type, trimmed, green, and weed-free. Now it’s not about whether you can afford one, it’s about how good it looks.


That brings me to the here and now.


Our guest house in Lusaka is located in the Kalundu neighbourhood, a wealthy neighbourhood where all the houses are gated and fences are topped with barbed wire, broken glass, or electric wires.  We walk past these gated homes, with small lawns and gardens in front, every morning to get to work. Gardeners tend to these lawns, carefully wielding their machetes to trim the blades; automatic sprinklers water the lawn at midday (nowhere in the world is this a practical time to water a lawn, especially not here during the dry season). We walk down the tarred road to a ravine, where we turn right down a dirt path into the Ng’ombe neighbourhood. Immediately the differences are visable: properties are delineated by straw fences or bushes, no longer do we see big gates and barbed wire; lawns are now dirt, which homeowners sweep with straw brushes to smooth out and collect the leaves and twigs and garbage that has fallen. We’ve asked guardians, who all live in Ng’ombe, if they have a garden so that they can grow their own food. So far, only two or three have said yes. The others would like to be able to, but water and seeds are too expensive. (Yet water is about 100-200 kwacha—about $0.02-0.04 for a jug.)

Nowhere are lawns more clearly a status symbol than here, where one neighbourhood has well-watered green space that serves no real purpose and the other neighbourhood, right next door, can’t even afford water for vegetables so they can afford eat more than once a day.

Melanie Ferguson
Overseas Intern – Zambia