TRANSCRIPT
Sound of phone ringing
Sam's Mom: Hi Sam.
Sam Baker: Hey Mom. So I've got a question for you. What is your favorite scent?
Sam's Mom: Um, I would have to say like fresh plants, grass.
Rachel Stewart: This is producer Sam chatting to her mum. And it's a bit of a trick, because Sam absolutely knew she was going to say grass.
Sam: I remember having these like grass scented candles growing up. I was just wondering if you have anything around the house that has grass scent or, or cut grass smell?
Sam's Mom: I do, I have two things. I have hand soap and I have dish soap.
Sam: You know, we had this pretty big yard growing up. I was trying to remember how often we used to mow it. I mean, mostly you used to mow it. Was it like every two weeks?
Sam's Mom: Oh, no, I usually mowed twice a week. I'd do half of it and then I'd do the other half…
Rachel: Sam’s mum, Ann actually has a degree in horticulture. But the real reason she likes the smell of freshly cut grass is probably a bit closer to home. It's probably just because… she's American.
Music
Clip: You know, if you have a lawn, it means that you're participating in the American dream, you're an American homeowner, you have a piece of America almost, this little lawn.
Rachel: The neatly mown lawn is a hallmark of American suburbia. And yet, where it came from is just about as un-American as you can get.
Clip: That style of gardening was associated with absolute monarchy.
Rachel: What you display in your lawn can be pretty revealing.
Clip: Eventually you get this kind of working class lawn, which is basically like kind of a postage stamp. And that's where the pink flamingos appear.
Rachel: A lawn can feel like a little oasis, our very own patch of nature - but what purpose is it really serving?
Clip: There's lots of lawn out there that is only walked on when it's mowed and that's the lawn that we want to get rid of.
Rachel: I'm Rachel Stewart, welcome to Don't Drink the Milk - The curious history of things. Today we're uncovering the tangled history of the lawn and what it tells us about how we see ourselves, our neighbors… and our relationship with Mother Nature.
Music
Phone ringing
Different voices: "развален телефон", "Chinese whispers", "telefono senza fili", "telephone", "kulaktan kulağa", "Stille Post", "испорченный телефон", "téléphone arabe", "głuchy telefon", "Russian scandal", "Don't drink the milk"
Dial tone, sound of hanging up phone
Sound of tourists queuing
Rachel: So we're here doing an episode about the history of lawns, can I ask you a couple of questions?
Younger couple: Sure!
Rachel: Do you guys have a lawn or a yard back home?
Woman: Yes. We do, we do.
Rachel: Does it look anything like these lawns?
Woman: No, it does not.
Man: Not exactly, no. No, I would say definitely not.
Rachel: So do you guys have a yard or a lawn?
Older woman: We do! Meet my gardener.
Older man: Hello.
Older woman: And it doesn't look like this… yet.
Older man: Not yet, I'm working on it.
Rachel: Do you have a yard back home?
Woman 3: I don't. I live in a condominium. We have a grounds crew.
Rachel: And if you think about the classic yards or lawns that you know from back home, do they look anything like what you've seen today?
Woman 3: Well, close. No, kidding! Of course not. Of course not. When I looked out here, the very first thing I said to my son is these are so manicured. You know, kind of almost ornamental if you will.
Rachel: So you prefer maybe a little bit more of a natural style?
Woman 3: Yeah, I think so. I mean, you look out over the lawn and you think 'woah!', but there's something, ah, it's not artificial exactly…
Rachel: Sam and I are bothering American tourists in one of Europe's most famous gardens – the gardens of Versailles. Just outside of Paris. And it really does seem very… pruned.
Music - goofy
Sam: Lots of topiary.
Rachel: I don't like topiary.
Sam: I had to Google what it was.
Rachel: Yeah, these like weirdly shaped bushes.
Sam: They're very strange.
Rachel: It's like a poodle!
Sam: Oh, yes.
Rachel: …where you feel a bit sorry for the dog, that they look so silly.
Sam: Yeah, I feel a bit sorry for the trees.
Rachel: Definitely [laughs]
Music out
Veronique Ciampini: So we are at the beginning like the King Louis XIV loved to begin the visit.
Rachel: Véronique Ciampini is a landscape engineer here. So we can see all those sculpted bushes - the topiary. There are also gilded fountains and perfectly manicured grass as far as the eye can see. Fit for a king, you might say.
Veronique: So it symbolized the power of the king, Louis XIV.
Rachel: So King Louis XIV – also known as the Sun King – moved to Versailles in 1661 and he commissioned a famous French landscape architect André Le Nôtre to design the palace's gardens.
Veronique: André Le Nôtre understood that the gardens are political gardens and it's a way for the king to say to the court and all visitors that all is in order.
Rachel: Well there's no denying that things look extremely orderly in this garden. In particular these neat stretches of lawn known as the "tapis verts".
Music - classical
Veronique: The tapis vert is a piece of grass and it's also a link between the palace and the gardens.
Rachel: "Tapis vert" might literally mean green carpet, but it's not for walking on or sinking your toes into…
Veronique: Uh, no [laughs]
Rachel: So a tapis vert, even though it's called a tapis…
Veronique: No.
Rachel: …is not for walking?
Veronique: No, no. It's just a tapis like embroidery, uh, tapestry!
Rachel: Interesting, it's more like a tapestry than a carpet. Okay.
Sam: As we see here in Versailles, the lawn became ornamental and a sort of status symbol. But it grew out of something very different.
Rachel: Ok, the evolution of grassy patches… I'm ready for it Sam. What can you tell us about what came before the lawn as we know it?
Sam: So earlier patches of grass were often more practical – pastures, meadows, village greens, town commons – places where people could graze their animals. Though some patches were more for enjoyment.
Music - medieval
Ian Thompson: Well, it's interesting, if you look at medieval images, paintings and tapestries, you often see people sitting on grass. But if you look closely at the grass, there's all kinds of other plants in there. This is sometimes described as the flowery mead. Mead, I suppose, from the same root as meadow. But you would find things like daisies and violets and clover and strawberries in there, for example.
Sam: That's Ian Thompson. He's a retired landscape architect, who taught at Newcastle University in the UK.
Rachel: Would everyone have their own flowery mead?
Sam: Not exactly.
Music - medieval wartime
Sounds of clanking swords
Sam: So this was back in the Middle Ages when small kingdoms across Europe were constantly at war with one another. They built up castles, well fortresses really, with tall walls to keep invaders out. And in the middle of these castle grounds would be a courtyard and perhaps, a flowery mead.
Rachel: So how did we get from this to lawns?
Ian: The thing about castles, at a certain point the walls became useless.
Music - sweeping, orchestral
Sam: The turning point comes when war settles down across Europe and rulers no longer need castle walls to protect against invasion.
Ian: By the Tudor period, people are building palaces or houses rather than castles. And they have extensive gardens, and that's really when lawns come into their own.
Sam: The walls came down and the gardens moved out. Instead of hiding and protecting what you had, it became more about putting your wealth on display. And one man who had plenty of wealth to put on display was Louis XIV.
Veronique: I think the purpose of Louis XIV was to create gardens to show his power over the world.
Music - classical
Rachel: How exactly do you use your garden to show your power over the world?! Well, we already know Louis was using Versailles to show how orderly everything was in his court. The design also makes use of straight lines and perspective to draw your eye to the horizon, as if the grounds go on to infinity. And things got even more philosophical…
Veronique: Après, plus globalement, ce qui va être mis à la pogée à Versailles, c'est la maîtrise de la nature…
Rachel: Veronique is saying that what's highlighted at Versailles is a command of nature. In 17th century Europe, ideas about humans' relationship with nature were changing. One really influential idea came from French philosopher René Descartes.
Music - darker
Rachel: He argued that nature is separate from man and that it's there to be conquered. This idea would endure for centuries –
Veronique: …puisqu 'à 'époque la nature est plutôt considérée comme hostile, dangereuse pour l 'homme…
Rachel: Veronique explains that nature was still seen as something hostile and dangerous. There were harsh winters and devastating famines. So Louis XIV wanted to prove that he was in control. That's why pretty much everything we see around us here is green. There are mostly evergreen varieties of shrubs and, of course, grass. Nothing much that would bloom in spring or lose its leaves in winter. The king was showing that he was above the seasons - above nature.
Music - changes to more upbeat, sweeping
Rachel: And it turns out the king was quite a trendsetter. Versailles ushered in a new era of gardens. Free from castle walls, its open spaces offered clean lines, sculpted greenery and formal, geometric designs, and lawns, just for decoration.
Veronique: It was a big influence in France and all over Europe.
Rachel: Aristocrats brought the Versailles gardening trend to their own palaces in France, Germany, Italy… But not everyone was a fan. You see, the French garden style is quite particular - remember all that topiary?
Ian: You know, it's a very artificial garden.
Rachel: Artificial and… a bit royalist?
Ian: There was a sort of revulsion against that in Britain and it was partly political, because that style of gardening was associated with absolute monarchy. In Britain, we'd got rid of absolute monarchy and they were looking for a style which was different from the autocratic sort of French style.
Music - sweeping green hills
Sam: The Brits threw out the straight lines and symmetry, for a different style.
Ian: It's much more naturalistic. In fact, one of the criticisms that was leveled at that style of garden was that it was so much like nature that you sometimes couldn't differentiate between nature and the garden.
Sam: Green rolling hills and meadows, the occasional sprinkling of trees, this English style was much, much less formal than any French garden. I think of the grounds of Downton Abbey or countless stately homes in Jane Austen novels.
Rachel: Remember that famous Le Nôtre guy in France? Well Britain's answer to him was a pioneering landscape architect called Lancelot Brown - better known by the nickname Capability.
Ian: Incidentally his name, 'Capability', comes from when he visited a new client, he would walk the grounds or ride the grounds with the owner. And then he would say, 'yeah, so I think it's got capabilities'. That word then meant something like we might say 'potential' today.
Sam: With all that potential, he would redesign landscapes, with manmade lakes and streams, artificial hills, newly planted trees, and a few dead ones for that realistic look. And of course, everything was connected with expanses of green lawn. So while this style looked very natural, it was actually very engineered.
Rachel: It also sounds very expensive.
Sam: Well, there was one built-in cost-saver.
Ian: Compared with the French style, it was much cheaper to maintain, because, you know, the animals in the park did most of the work. They were the lawnmowers.
Sound of horse munching on grass
Music - classical
Sound of English gardens, chickens
Rachel: Oh, wow!
Sam: This is what I wanted you to see.
Rachel: Oh my god they're so cute!
Sam: Alright Rachel, so this is the Queen's Hamlet.
Rachel: Oh my god I love it, I want to move in.
Sam: Back in Versailles, I've brought Rachel to a corner of the gardens I think she might like.
Sam: Do you feel at home amongst this little village of cottages?
Rachel: I mean I can't say I've ever lived in a house that looks like this but they look super cute and maybe some of my ancestors did?
Sam: The Queen's Hamlet has a very different vibe to what we've seen so far.
Sam: Look at those pumpkins!
Rachel: Wow!
Sam: Storybook cottages with thatched roofs and vegetable patches bursting with leeks and leafy cabbage.
Sam: I really expect the birds and bunnies to start talking to us.
Rachel: Yeah, they're gonna come out of those little holes.
Rachel: By the late 18th century, France was onto their 16th King Louis. You've probably heard of his wife, Marie Antoinette. Well this French queen became a fan of the gardening trends developing across the English Channel. More messy, more wild, more…
Rachel: Just super quaint, almost too quaint. Like they've gone a little bit too far, I'd say. I feel like we've entered a theme park. I mean if you were the queen of France, this would feel like a proper getaway.
Sam: Because, as Veronique told us, this place was a kind of escape from the extreme orderliness of Versailles. Here, nature looked more… natural.
Rachel: Of course, whether it was French kings taming the seasons, English aristocrats molding the landscape or Marie Antoinette making a mini-England in her garden - they were all still imposing their will on nature and showing that they had the power and money to do so.
Sam: And that instead of using your land for something practical like farming, you could afford to use that land just for show. Which doesn't sound so far off from the lawns I know from home…
Music - American revolution drums and flute
Ian: One thing to bear in mind is that, you know, the founding fathers of America were essentially very English in their tastes and attitudes. Weren't they?
Sam: We might've broken away from English rule, but we didn't manage to break away from English garden rule.
Ian: George Washington at Mount Vernon, he ordered the creation of a bowling green and a deer park. And I understand that he imported English grass seed. Thomas Jefferson at Monticello did similarly, and he also laid out the university of Virginia and it has a feature called 'the lawn' and there's an academic village arranged around it.
Sam: But most people weren't Washington or Jefferson. Ordinary homes didn't have bowling greens or a deer park or lawns out front. In fact, they were usually very close to the street with an enclosed garden in the back, not unlike middle class homes in Europe. The transition to big front lawns came about later, with the help of two major developments– first, another English invention.
Music - early 20th century
Ian: The first lawnmower was invented by a couple of guys called John Ferrabee and Edwin Budding.
Sam: The inspiration for the lawnmower was a machine that used a rotating cylinder to trim extra fluff from woolen cloth, so it would be smooth to the touch.
Ian: And they made the creative leap and saw that the same technology, this rotating blade, could be used in a cylinder mower to cut grass.
Sam: The first version patented in 1830 was pulled by horses. It was followed by a steam mower and then a gasoline-powered mower in 1902.
Sound of lawnmower cord starting up & then mowing
Sam: So the lawn mower made it easier to mow a lawn, but people still needed a lawn to mow. Which was quite rare for the average person until…
Music - mid-century America
Sam: A fellow by the name of Frederick Law Olmsted came along and designed a suburb of Chicago, called Riverside. Olmsted proposed that houses should be set back from the road by 30 feet.
Ian: You know, that set out the sort of pattern of having these front yards, which could be grass. So you weren't supposed to hide your lawn away, you were supposed to display it to everyone.
Sam: It's worth noting that Olmsted also designed Central Park in New York City. And similar to English country estates, Central Park is very manmade, but meant to look very natural. In the suburbs, Olmsted was going for a similar park-like vibe. So the idea is one home's front yard continues into the next with uninterrupted grass. And that really distinguished the American middle class yard from back those in Europe –
Ian: I would probably characterize it and say that the English lawn is still pretty much a private affair. We also like to have hedges or walls. Whereas typically American yards, they're probably bigger. And the lawns are visible to the rest of the street.
Rachel: So, just like the gardens of the French royals and English gentry, the American front yard eventually became like a kind of exhibition space?
Sam: Exactly. And if you're going to put your garden on display, you'd better be prepared for some judgy neighbors.
Rachel: Oh yes.
Sam: The rise of suburbs came with homeowners associations, covenants and municipal ordinances - all imposing rules on your home and garden. Breaking those rules can have serious consequences, even today.
Music - news bulletin
"Man gets $30,000 fine for not mowing grass"
"Boys mow lawn to keep elderly Texas woman, out of jail"
"Grand Prairie man goes to jail for overgrown lawn"
Jenny Price: So, lawns become this incredibly important battleground for taste.
Sam: This is Jenny Price, a writer and environmental historian.
Jenny: Now, taste is a really interesting idea. I think everybody sort of feels like they know what taste is, but if you really ask, 'well, like, what is taste?' It's actually kind of hard to answer.
Sam: But of course that didn't stop many people from trying to answer it for themselves. In 1870, a guy named Frank Jessup Scott, wrote The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds.
Jenny: And it's all about keeping the lawn tasteful, which means basically keeping it natural. And he is obsessed with, you know, 'you have to keep it simple. You have to keep it natural. You can't overload your lawn with figures and vases and flowers and things like that.' The closer you get to the house, the more ok it is to have a few of these things and the farther you get from the house, the more absolutely essential it is to keep that you know bastion of nature.
Sam: And that particular notion of taste had staying power.
Jenny: Anybody from anywhere in the world who's driven through an American suburb will see that a lawn is a piece of grass, basically. It's basically a piece of grass with nothing on it. Americans (this is a very class oriented thing again) generally do not approve of putting anything in your front yard. No chairs, no lawn ornaments, no anything.
Sam: Jenny says a minimal, but freshly mown front lawn is a clear marker of taste in middle-class America.
Jenny: Where you have money and you can buy things. You can buy really nice clothes and you can have a really big lawn. But you show that you have restraint, right? So it's just kind of you're showing that you have wealth, but you also have restraint as opposed to the excesses of the, you know, of the elite upper class.
Rachel: So you don't want to be as ostentatious as the royals in Versailles. But you also don't want to be at the other end of the spectrum, which I guess would be represented by…?
Sam: Maybe a pink flamingo?
Jenny: Yeah, well, the pink flamingo starts off with this actually quite straightforward set of meanings. It's a lawn ornament and it's a kind of working class tradition to buy these kind of what a lot of people would call tacky lawn ornaments. And it's pink and it's glitzy and it has some kind of more straightforward meanings among working class homeowners who put them out on their lawns in the fifties and sixties that 'I own a piece of America basically, and I am participating in the American dream.'
Sound of sprinkler kicking on
Sam: After World War II, low-cost mortgages for veterans – white veterans that is – made the American dream of owning a home (with a yard) accessible to many more Americans.
Sound of sprinkler going strong
Sam: For those who could afford it that meant a big house with a big lawn. For others, that meant something a bit smaller.
Sound of sprinkler sputtering out
Sam: If you're a working class homeowner, with a small house and a tiny lawn, it makes sense you might want to jazz it up a little bit!
Jenny: I started looking into the history of plastic pink flamingos, and I actually decided, ultimately, that it tells us just about as much about American ideas of nature as any other topic I've ever run across.
Sam: Once again, we've come back to the question of what is 'natural'? Natural being a marker of taste. For many, a plastic lawn ornament modeled after a real animal, didn't fit the bill.
Jenny: It's absolutely excoriated by art critics. You know, it's plastic and of course plastics become a symbol of what's unnatural. So plastic, and then it's pink. This kind of neon pink. And it's a flamingo! I mean, you might find a duck on a lawn. But you're not going to find a flamingo on a lawn in New Jersey.
Sam: These plastic birds are a brighter shade of pink than the real deal. And whether displayed sincerely or with a bit of irony, they seem to always be associated with being fake, unreal, or unnatural.
Jenny: So it becomes this symbol of what is not nature. But ironically, the plastic flamingo, just like everything, is made out of nature. My books, my computer, the toothpicks, my phone, everything is made out of nature. It's made out of petroleum and wood and, you know, natural materials, because Nature is the stuff with which we create our lives. And so is the plastic flamingo. I mean, I've been to the factory and you see these polyethylene crystals that they use that are tinged with petroleum based-dyes, and they turn that into the plastic flamingo, and then they use steel for the legs. That's ore that comes out of the ground. And a plastic flamingo is nature incarnate.
Rachel: Woah woah woah. So Jenny is saying that the plastic flamingo IS nature, because essentially all the materials that go into it originally derived from nature?
Sam: Yes.
Rachel: Wow. But couldn't you just say that about anything?
Sam: Exactly! A simple plastic lawn ornament brings us back to our old friend Descartes. Rather than nature and the human world being separate as he argues, Jenny is saying that everything in our lives – plastic or otherwise – comes from nature, and therefore we're not so separate after all.
Jenny: It's very pernicious because this is- it allows us to think that nature is this place apart rather than nature is the foundation of our lives.
Rachel: Mind blown.
Sam: Jenny even argues that if you're going to point fingers at something for being manmade, maybe it should be at the lawn.
Jenny: What's interesting about the lawn is that it's supposed to be this bastion of nature. But it requires an enormous amount of human labor, right? You have to create it first, you have to irrigate it, you have to blast it with pesticides. I mean, environmentally, it's a total disaster. It's like one non-native species that supports essentially no wildlife. And it requires a lot of water, and it's loaded with pesticides. It's the most unnatural thing you could think of, actually. It's really ironic.
Music - gentle guitar
Rachel: We'll be right back.
TRAILERS
Music - gentle guitar
Sam: So Rachel, could you please read this in your most posh, old fashioned, British accent?
Rachel: [clears throat] "There are two things particular to us that contribute much to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf."
Sam: Beautiful. So that's a line written by Sir William Temple. And I think it highlights something really special about your country Rachel.
Rachel: That we have really nice grass?
Sam: Yeah kind of, but there's a reason for that. You've got the climate for it – not too hot, plenty of rain… plenty of rain!
Rachel: Fair enough, I can't deny it.
Sam: And that's pretty different to a good chunk of my country.
Sound of geese and garden
Shaun Moser: We're not necessarily anti-lawn here. We just think we have way too much of it. So there's lots of lawn out there that is only walked on when it's mowed and that's the lawn that we want to get rid of.
Sound of birds
Sam: That's Shaun Moser who manages something called the Conservation Garden Park, which is where I met him in a suburb of Utah's Salt Lake City. He explains that as people migrated west over the years, they brought their East Coast landscaping styles with them.
Shaun: So they wanted to have lawns and big trees and things like that, that look like the places that they came from. But as the population has grown, and with the amount of water that is given to lawns, it's just not sustainable anymore.
Sam: Americans use 8 billion gallons of water a day for residential outdoor spaces, i.e. our lawns and gardens. The local water district has taken a more inspirational approach to cut down on this water use. They built a small botanical garden where people could come to get ideas for how to reimagine their ownlawns.
Shaun: Yeah, so this is Conservation Garden Park. It's here to show businesses, homeowners, how to save water in their landscapes mainly. I think the average residential landscape in Utah that's mostly lawn is 150-200,000 gallons of water per season to water that landscape.
Sam: That's like a small water tower or 2,000 bathtubs for each lawn, every summer. Shaun and his team want people to think beyond grass – to reimagine the lawn altogether…
Shaun: Trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs, all of those usually use less water than lawn does.
Sam: And you know what? Some of these alternatives are way more interesting than a standard strip of grass.
Shaun: …So this is a mugo pine here. This one's called Karsten's winter gold. And then also another one in this area that I like is lavender. It does really well for us here in Utah, in the desert. We have some that's been in the garden for 15, 20 years and we haven't watered it in 15 or 20 years. It's just watered by the rain and the snow.
Sam: If this sustainable inspiration isn't enough to tempt locals to shake up their gardens, there's also a financial incentive…
Erik: Yeah, this year we're offering three dollars per square foot of lawn removed, which adds up pretty quickly, so it ends up being a significant boost for people.
Sam: Yep, they're paying people to rip out their lawns. Eric Vermel is the Conservation Supervisor for Jordan Valley Water. And he tells me it's not as simple as replacing your lawn with gravel or rock. You need plants that can actually help the landscape retain water.
Erik: It's about replacing it with something that's better for this landscape. And it's also about a cultural shift. And we're also creating attractive environments, where you can go out, see birds in your landscape, bring butterflies and pollinators back.
Sound of driving & parking
Erik: I remember this, this yard being entirely lawn.
Rob: It was.
Erik: It was entirely lawn and it was a lot of effort for you to mow and maintain…
Rob: Yes, it took a long time to mow. I would actually have to do it in two sessions because I would get so tired from mowing it the first time, then I'd have to go and do the next part of the yard after taking a 15 or 20 minute break.
Sam: Do you miss all that mowing?
Rob: I really don't.
Sam: Eric's brought me to meet Rob Bennett, a homeowner who decided to take up the offer to recreate his yard in a more water-efficient way.
Rob: We had to put so much water down to keep all that lawn green that it was just ridiculous. We're saving all kinds of money now. And we're feeling good about making a contribution to the overall water picture for the state.
Sam: Today Rob's garden has got a lot more going on than just an empty blanket of uniform grass.
Rob: These are the paths as they go through the yard. We have Japanese maples that we were able to put in that are just one of my favorite plants in the world. And then this is the front yard where we took out about half of the lawn and then just put some beautiful granite boulders and other, uh, what am I thinking of? Mulch!
Sam: I love the front. It's probably, you know, when people are out walking, walking their dogs, it's much more to look at than just lawn.
Rob: Since we started doing it, everybody in our neighborhood is looking to do it too. So, it's a snowball effect.
Rachel: So, does this mean we are entering a new chapter in the story of the lawn?
Sam: It kinda looks like it! And it's not just in the US…
Music - upbeat folk
Ian: I'm not sort of saying that let everything go, although I'm more inclined towards that than I used to be. You know, there is a sort of fashion for wild gardens. Which, if there's a plant in your garden and you like it, you know, keep it.
Sam: That's Ian Thompson again, explaining that grassy patches may be going back to their roots.
Ian: We are going back towards the flowery mead. And actually the suburban garden is one of the places which can be a sanctuary for wildlife. I think this is all to be encouraged, really.
Rachel: Flowery mead!
Sam: It's making a comeback.
Music
Rachel: This episode of Don't Drink the Milk was landscape designed by Sam Baker. It was mown over by editor Charli Shield. Julia Rose was on archive duty and Katharina Abel took care of fact checking. I'm your queen, I mean host, Rachel Stewart. If you want to help us grow our garden of listeners, please do leave us a review or do the neighborly thing, and tell one of your friends about us. All in good taste!
Music
Sam's Mom, Ann: What's it about?
Sam: It's for our lawns episode.
Ann: Oh, well, I have so much more to say about lawns!
Sam: Well, I know, but…
Ann: Okay, because they're awful.
Sam: I know.
Ann: You knew I was going to say grass!
Sam: Yep, I did.
Ann: Oh! Okay. All right, I love you.
Sam: Love you too. Bye.