The monocultural lawn, when reexamined with an eye towards the historic aesthetic basis of the front lawn, how these ideals of yards necessitated and were encouraged by the lawn-care industry, and the biological effects of lawn-care chemical inputs, appears as a bizarre landscape. It is astounding that a landscape native to the Victorian aristocracy could spread across the North American continent, codified and expressed in front setbacks mandated by zoning codes in nearly all American cities. The deep roots of yarded suburban development are also interesting to consider; by tracing the forms and ideology connected to garden estates, it is easy to situate railroad and streetcar development (and thus the vast majority of Portland’s built environment) as quasi-suburban. By looking at the history of lawn aesthetics and care, we can see that lawn culture was shaped by idealists, city zoning, technology, consumer desires and producers’advertising. Each step taken towards a monocultural ideal lawn necessitated more land, more labor, more machines, and more chemical inputs.