The Width of Itself

A lawn is not what happens when you leave a place alone. It is a continuously maintained state — mown, watered, fed, and chemically edited to remove every plant that is not one of a very few grasses.

The scale is genuinely hard to pin down, and we will give you the honest version rather than the quotable one. Milesi and colleagues modelled turfgrass cover in the United States at about 163,800 square kilometres — roughly 63,000 square miles — in Environmental Management in 2005. That is a model built from satellite imagery and assumptions, not a census, and the accompanying claim that turf is the country's largest irrigated crop is disputed, not least by the turf industry's own trade press. Elizabeth Kolbert, reviewing two books on lawns in 2008, gives nearly fifty thousand square miles.

Take the range and leave the headline. Somewhere between the area of New York State and the area of Georgia is kept in a condition it would not hold on its own. That is the fact this zine needs, and it survives the disagreement.

An attribution we moved. That line is regularly credited to Kolbert, who quotes it. It is Levitt's, by way of Steinberg's book — one of the two Kolbert was reviewing. We have not opened Steinberg at primary; see the colophon.

This zine is not going to re-argue monoculture. The Universe Runs on Difference (No. 8) did that, with the Cavendish banana and the fragility of a clone-field. This one starts where that one stops, and asks a narrower question: what about the plant that grows there anyway?

Before the plant, the ground. In 2020 a team at Nottingham and the James Hutton Institute set out to watch what wild plant roots actually do to compacted soil, and to do that they first had to build the hostile condition on purpose.

Sandy loam, packed to a bulk density of 1.8 grams per cubic centimetre, with a penetration resistance of 1.55 megapascals. Those two numbers are the environment, and they are not metaphors.

Bulk density is how much soil is crammed into a given volume — the higher it goes, the less of that volume is pore space for air, water and roots. Penetration resistance is the force needed to push through it. 1.55 megapascals is roughly fifteen times atmospheric pressure, and root elongation in many species is already substantially reduced well below the 2 megapascals often cited as the point where growth effectively stops.

So: not impossible ground. Hard ground. The kind that mowers, feet and machinery make, and that a lawn quietly accumulates year after year while looking, from above, entirely fine.

Three species went into that soil, and the choice is worth noticing: Plantago lanceolata (ribwort plantain), Taraxacum officinale (dandelion), and Cirsium vulgare (spear thistle).

All three are wild dicots. All three are plants a lawn is built to exclude. The experiment is, without saying so, a study of weeds.

A grass root system is fibrous — many fine roots, spread wide and shallow, excellent at holding a surface and poor at going down through anything firm. A taproot is the other strategy: one thickened vertical axis that stores carbohydrate and drives downward, with laterals branching off it.

That is why dandelions persist in ground where the grass around them is struggling, and it is why they are so hard to pull: leave a fragment of the root and the plant returns from it. The taproot is a survival organ, and it is doing exactly what it evolved to do in disturbed, trodden, opened ground.

The plants grew for 28 days. Then the soil around them was imaged by X-ray computed tomography — the same physics as a hospital scanner, pointed at a column of dirt, so that the pore structure could be measured in place rather than by taking the soil apart.

This is the good part of the method. You cannot sieve a soil to find out what its intact pore structure was. The measurement had to be non-destructive or it would have destroyed the thing it was measuring.

Here is what they found, and it is the whole zine.

For the dandelion, by day 28, the numbers were these:

Seventy micrometres is about the width of a human hair. The zone the root loosened, then halved, then lost, is thinner than the line this sentence is printed in.

The dandelion did not open up the soil. It opened a channel the width of itself, and a hair's breadth of margin either side. Beyond that, the ground it was planted in was the ground it left behind.

Not a failure of the plant. This is a root doing precisely what a root does, and doing it well enough to live. The finding is about reach, not about effort.

You will find that sentence, or a close cousin of it, in university extension bulletins, garden almanacs, permaculture guides and several hundred thousand posts. It is the version of this science that travels.

And it is not a lie. Taproots do penetrate firm soil. They do leave channels. Something real is being pointed at.

But look at what happened to the sentence on the way. The study supports: a measurable increase in pore space in a mantle around the root, greatest in the first seventy micrometres, halved by a hundred and forty, and not detectable at the scale of the pot. The travelling version keeps the verb and drops every condition attached to it — and the conditions were the finding.

This is the house's recurring quarrel, and we will not re-run it here: Too Good to Check holds the taxonomy of how a fact goes wrong, and No. 40 argues why smoothing matters. A claim shaped to be repeatable is not the same as a claim shaped to be true, and the second one usually has a number and a limit stapled to it.

What we are not saying. Not that gardeners are wrong to like dandelions, or that a taproot does nothing. We are saying the published measurement is local and small, and that anyone claiming the whole column should say which study measured it. We could not find one.

There is a second thing about dandelions that the lawn metaphor does not survive intact, and it is stranger than the first.

Most dandelions are clones. The genus reproduces largely by apomixis — setting viable seed without fertilisation — so a seed head is not a shuffle of two parents. It is a batch of copies. Apomictic dandelions are triploid or tetraploid; the sexual ones are mostly diploid, and they are the minority.

Majeský, Vašut, Kitner and Trávníček looked at 187 individuals across nine microspecies and reported that apomictic accessions are “genetically highly homogeneous.” Where variation does exist within a clone, it comes from accumulated mutation. The real variety — the hundreds of described microspecies — is, in their reading, “most likely of sexual origin”: inherited from episodes of sex in the lineage's past, not being generated now.

Which means the tidy version of the metaphor — grass monoculture versus dandelion biodiversity — has a clone-field on both sides of it.

Nick Covington, writing for Human Restoration Project the day before this zine was made, closes an argument about schools as monocultures with a line worth keeping:

That holds. It is a claim about escape — about something persisting in conditions built to prevent it — and both of the findings in this zine make it stronger, not weaker. A plant that survives 1.55 megapascals of resistance by growing a channel the width of a hair has genuinely triumphed. That is a hard-won life.

What does not survive is the step the metaphor invites you to take next: that the weed is the diversity the lawn is missing. Biologically it is not. It is a narrow, clonal, disturbance-adapted specialist that happens to be good at exactly this. It is a survivor, not a remedy.

This sharpens Covington rather than correcting him. If even the weed is not the answer to the lawn, then the answer was never going to be found among the things growing in it. It has to be the ground.

We know what 6.9 per cent at seventy micrometres feels like, because a great many of us have done it.

The Autistic kid who got through the school — not because the school changed, but because they found one corridor, one teacher, one hour of the week that held. The Disabled worker who lasted at the job because of a single manager who said yes and did not put it in writing. The student who passed by masking so hard they lost years afterwards to the cost of it.

Every one of those is a channel opened by force, the width of one person, in ground that stayed exactly as hard as it was. Real. Measurable. Not nothing.

And then the trap closes, because the system reads the survivor as evidence about itself. She managed. He got through it. They coped. The channel is taken as proof that the column was fine, when the channel is in fact the most precise available measurement of how hard the column was.

The paper is careful in a way institutions are not. It says the change was in the rhizosphere. It says, plainly, that changes were not observed at the whole-column scale. Nobody wrote a press release claiming the pot had been fixed.

Soil at 1.8 grams per cubic centimetre does not get better because something brave grew in it. It gets better when what is being done to it changes.

Less traffic over it. Less weight. Cover that keeps it open through a winter. Time in which nothing presses down. These are all things done to the ground, by whoever has the machinery. None of them is available to the plant.

Covington's essay names three levels where a school actually holds its shape — structures (time, space, who reports to whom), systems (the timetable, the grading, the behaviour policy) and practices (what gets done on a Tuesday). Ours is a related claim, made from the soil: the environment and the systems are the load-bearing rungs, and everything asked of the individual is being asked several storeys up from where the problem lives.

Etta Kralovec's Schools That Do Too Much (Beacon Press, 2003) makes the argument we would otherwise have had to make ourselves: how a school spends its time and money is not a fact of nature. It is an accumulation of decisions, and decisions can be unmade.

A paraphrase, marked as one. That is a characterisation of Kralovec's argument, not a quotation. The line usually quoted from her is one we could not confirm against the book, so we have not printed it in quotation marks. See the colophon.

There is a second dandelion, and it points the other way.

In 2005 W. Thomas Boyce and Bruce J. Ellis borrowed a pair of terms from Swedish — where the word maskrosbarn, dandelion children, was already in use — to name two ways of meeting an environment. The dandelion is the low-sensitivity one, who does tolerably almost anywhere. The orchid is exquisitely sensitive to context. Lionetti, Aron, Aron and colleagues later put numbers on it across 906 adults and added a third in the middle: 29% dandelions, 40% tulips, 31% orchids.

And the orchid half is not a story about fragility. Under poor conditions orchids do worst — but under good ones they do better than the dandelions. Susceptibility runs in both directions. What looks like a weakness in hard ground is the same trait that becomes an advantage in good ground, which means every orchid failing in a compacted room is also a result nobody got to see.

Held honestly: the neat categories are contested — later work argues susceptibility is continuous rather than bimodal. That cuts our way. If you cannot sort people into three flowers, you cannot run a programme per flower. You can only build ground that holds the range.

So set the two dandelions side by side. In the lawn, it is the plant that got through hard ground. In the sensitivity literature, it is the one who would have got through anywhere. Both readings say the same thing about the ground: hard ground does not produce variety. It selects for whoever needed least from it — and then the survivors get counted as the normal range.

Behaviourism is the machinery that presses down. Its offer is precise: the ground can stay exactly as hard, if the child is trained to tolerate it. Compliance becomes the measured outcome, so the compaction never appears in the data — it appears as a child who is doing better. We are not re-arguing its history here; No. 70 and No. 42 do that. The soil claim is enough: you cannot compact a medium and then read what grows as a fair account of what could have grown.

Unmaking is the first half, and it is mostly subtraction — stop pressing, stop rewarding tolerance of the pressing, stop scoring the response you narrowed the room to produce. Remaking is Cavendish Space: our name for environments built for the whole range rather than the tolerant middle. Caves for going quiet and deep, campfires for learning together, watering holes for exchange — the primordial learning spaces David Thornburg named, whose set is actually four, with life the one that usually gets dropped.

Not one room made kinder. Several conditions available at once, so that being sensitive to your surroundings stops being a liability and becomes what it always was — a way of being well matched to somewhere in particular.