Lawns are perhaps one of the most identifiable intersections of a cultural and natural environment. Prevalent in built landscapes across America, lawns fill the voids around buildings and roads with an unassuming greenness and apparent naturality, brightening the blight of concrete with strips of “nature.” The innate low-profile character of lawns makes their utter bizarreness in many aspects go unnoticed. Only one of the common turfgrass species cultivated in the United States is native to North America (Robbins and Sharp 2003, 958), the climate of North America varies dramatically, with many regions hospitable to these English pasture grasses (Bormann, et al. 1993, 28-30), and lawns serve no direct material purpose to homeowners, yet an artificially verdant, man-made savanna stretches from coast to coast, with turf grass being “the single largest irrigated ‘crop’in the United States”(Milesi, et al. 2005, 432). American consumers are willing to spend nine billion dollars per year on fertilizers, pesticides, and lawn-care equipment to maintain this green expanse (Robbins and Sharp 2003, 427). This constructed landscape covers even progressive communities such as Portland, whose widely disseminated “alternative” image seems at odds with the suburban ethos of conformity that lawns frequently represent.