The historic roots of the American lawn lay in the gardens of the English and French aristocracy of the eighteenth century (Jenkins 1994, 13). With lawn maintenance before the nineteenth century requiring laborers to trim the grass with scythes (Bormann, et al. 1993, 23), the cultivation of a large expanse of green turf on a country estate was a highly resource-intensive activity confined to the landed elite. Though some Americans began growing lawns in the eighteenth century, with wealthy landowners copying English garden styles (Jenkins 1994, 15), landscape architecture remained a niche activity of the society at large. Yards for the working and middle classes in cities and small towns being either nonexistent, “small, fenced gardens,” plots “of swept dirt, clay, or sand,”or refuse dumps (Jenkins 1994, 15). Indeed, there was little room for functionless carpets of green for the masses in the traditional rural or urban built forms of early America; most users were more concerned with maximizing the utility of the land, through either crop growth or efficient housing. Moreover, before the middle of the nineteenth century, both cities and small towns were characterized by compact density, owing to the fact that walking was the predominant form of transportation. In 1819, even the center of the largest city in the world, London, was only three miles from the very edge of urban development; gross densities in these traditional cities “normally exceeded 75,000 per square mile”(Jackson 1985, 14), over fifteen times the density of Portland today (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). In such an urban environment, “lot sizes were small (usually less than twenty feet wide), streets were narrow, and houses were close to the curb”(Jackson 1985, 14). Many early small towns also followed these same design principles as well (Jackson 1985, 56). For the American lawn to grow, first the American suburb and all its attendant aesthetics had to sprout.