In the Garden of Even

In your mind's eye, picture a green sward: you have just imagined the requisite visual field for the American garden of everyman. A simple skin of grass on earth—a lawn—grounds the minimal American garden. The lawn provides the matrix for the garden; this humble garden substrate composes my koinos topos. 1 Meaning topic, or, more literally, ‘common place’. In their symbolic and cultural construction of the cosmos, Americans locate five senses ‘in nature’. Vision clearly outshines the pack as the ‘privileged sense’, to which I shall pay homage by taking the lawn as archetype, icon, and artifact, and present diverse perspectives upon this green space.