A Paradise of Frogs

by John Hanson Mitchell

Moderator: Jim Siegel, FWS - NCTC

In his essay, A Paradise of Frogs, John Hanson Mitchell found that in civilizing his Massachusetts yard he had lost his beloved frogs.   When he realizes his mistake, he attempts to re-wild his property by putting in small ponds and letting the grass and weeds go.  After reading the short excerpt, have you ever tried to re-wild a place? Is this even possible given the American ideal is mowing, trimming and landscaping for a well manicured lawn?  Mitchell’s observations can serve as a critique of our national obsession with the mowed lawn. 

 

 

We can think that a neat yard is simply the natural order of things in a modern society.  Yet, the lawn aesthetic is hardly some pan-human value.  It’s existence in 21^st century America is part of our English endowment from the Tudor and Elizabethan eras, only becoming common place in our country as mowing machines replaced scythes and grazing by sheep in the 19^th century, with the aesthetic exploding in the 1950s as suburbs spread into rural country-sides.   Today the lawn is an important aspect of the interaction between the natural environment and the constructed urban and suburban space in the entire U.S., no matter the natural community or climate.

 

In a thought experiment that could have come right out of Jared Diamond’s Germs, Guns and Steel, what would be our national yard aesthetic  if our country had been initially founded by another culture, say people native to Peru or New Guinea.  All I know is that we could have certainly saved ourselves a lot of time, effort and treasure, and protected millions of acres of wild nature, to boot.

Introducing John Hanson Mitchell

A Paradise of Frogs: 

John Hanson Mitchell was born in 1940 in Gaylewood, New Jersey, and he has his B.A. in comparative literature from Colombia University.  He lives outside Boston, where he serves as the editor of Sanctuary, the magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and writes about urban and suburban nature.  He is the author of a number of innovative and imaginative books about urban nature that seek out and depict the wildness surviving amidst our proliferating suburbs.  

This brief essay on frogs, which originally appeared as an editor's column in Sanctuary, has the whimsical imagination, the concern for wildlife habitat and the history that we humans write upon the land, and the dedication to the richness of nearby nature that characterize his work. We will begin discussing A Paradise of Frogs on Monday,September 2nd.