And so, on many blocks, a diligently restored house or two will be punctuated by a drearily neglected one, with a waist-high lawn out front and a gutted interior.
Fall is when both high-nitrogen (lawn trimmings) and high-carbon materials (dead leaves) are plentiful.
To the north, the park broadens to a huge lawn, high on the sides but hollowed out in the middle to create a great green basin.
"It's a very high-end lawn care at an artistic level.
The Busby Berkeley stylisations are grim enough, but the high school lawn-mowing has to be seen to be disbelieved.
Nearby, a strip of barren land had been cleared with a type of high-powered lawn mower to make a new path.
"Please don't let it happen," said Walt Chastain, production director at the Gibbs Landscape Company, one of the region's many high-end lawn designers.
On Saturday night, a pair of gleaming red Ferraris were prominently parked by the entrance, like high-priced lawn ornaments; one license plate read "CABAYO," a version of the Spanish word for horse, while the other advised: "PLAYHRD".
Of course lawns are only evil to those tasked with maintaining them; for others, especially children, they can be places of delight, grassy playgrounds on which they can, like the pupils in Thomas Hardy's The High-School Lawn, go whirling and laughing through the warm summer.
Since the early nineteen-seventies, when it first appeared on a high-school lawn in New Jersey, Ultimate Frisbee has been kicked around like the frayed hacky sack of the sports world, getting called everything from a "glorified game of toss" to "World of Warcraft for extroverts".
