Paul Cappiello Yew Dell Botanical Gardens It has always been surprising to me that despite the fact that the cultivated lawn is a purely human invention, we should have such a tortured and painful relationship with our turf. Lawns started out as a very public sign of wealth — think Downton Abbey and the like. If you could afford to have a crew of tweed-clad gardeners spend their days on hands and knees with little hand clippers and precision scythes, you were certainly worth inviting to the neighborhood barbeque. Later, the Levittown Lawn of the 1950s was a contractual requirement foisted on all of its new homeowners. And thus American lawn lust was born.