Oh, hello!
It’s me, Saffron, editor of your new favourite zine, Kill Your Lawn. It’s the first new zine from a new micro-press project of mine, and it’s just the beginning. Kill Your Lawn aims to be a playful, stylistically diverse, and never quite thorough celebration of all the joy that plants, gardens, horticulture, and even agriculture can make for us.
So, why should you “kill your lawn”? As a title, it’s a little bit of a snarky jab at the idea of those traditional monocultural lawns, perfectly trim, uniformly green. Turns out I’m not a fan.
The zine isn’t about lawns. It’s about plants in general and the magic they hold. It’s a magic I came to feel deeply pretty early in
life. I first started engaging with plants by helping my mother in the garden and watering her incredible houseplant collection. My relationship with plants deepened as I grew older. It was enriched through my visits to our home country and through getting my hands dirty. It was built on the agony and joy of trying, failing, and trying again to raise succulents (I got there, sort of). Eventually, I finally had a garden of my own. Watching life spring unbidden but encouraged from the newly-warming ground, I realized:
Lawns are wack as hell.
Lawn owners become single-minded in pursuit of arbitrary perfection. We arm ourselves with chemistry, and with hubris. We work so hard to push and prod and mow and fertilize and pesticide and weed whack (yes, whack!) this tiny flat bit of creation into something it desperately does not want to be, and yet it never fails to fail. Nothing about our lawns end up being about our lawns. So,
Kill your lawn.
You see where I’m going with this, right? What if we turned that monumental effort into absolutely anything else? What if we let our lawns die by letting them grow? What if we showed ourselves that same grace?
Let’s kill our lawns.
With these questions in mind, I’m putting out an ongoing call for submissions. There will beat least one piece touching on lawns in every issue, yes. But, as I mentioned:
The lawns aren’t the point.
The point is the lovely work — in text and visuals — brought to you by an international roster of fabulous artists, perhaps including you.
Ready to kill your lawn? Get in touch at latebloomer.ca
This text was adapted from the first volume of Kill Your Lawn zine. Kill Your Lawn is a compilation zine that seeks to explore the potential that gardening, plants, and agriculture have to change lives, communities, and the world. It is published on a semi-regular basis by Late Bloomer, a micro press built on fostering the work of artists whose voices are frequently discouraged or filtered out. Visit latebloomer.ca to find out more.