Washington-area columnist recounts drought, lawn installation, and the debate over grass and children

Washington Examiner senior columnist Timothy P. Carney used the timing of a regional drought to frame a personal and cultural argument in favor of residential lawns. Writing in a first-person register, Carney described laying sod in his suburban backyard just as the Washington, D.C., area entered what weather trackers at The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang called "a DC rainhole" — a stretch in which the metro area received less rain than anywhere else east of the Mississippi.

Carney noted that anti-lawn coverage, including a 2022 New York Times video, has characterized lawns as environmentally damaging, water-intensive, and rooted in European aristocratic and white middle-class suburban tradition. He described reading this coverage and observing that it rarely mentions children as a reason families maintain grass.

The columnist cited a 2008 New Yorker essay by Elizabeth Kolbert, which he described as unusual among anti-lawn pieces for acknowledging that lawns give children a place to play — though Kolbert, as Carney characterized her argument, concluded that grass "has no productive value" beyond cultural function. Carney presented this as an illustration of his broader contention that critics of lawns tend not to account for families with children.