Say, your yard’s looking mighty fine lately, Jim,” Stan Cox imagines commenting to a neighbour. “Everything OK with your wife?” The amount of energy devoted to lawn care in the US, he believes, is frequently in inverse proportion to the amount devoted to the bedroom.

Cox is participating in an all-out assault on American turf called Edible Estates, Fritz Haeg’s project to excavate lawns across the country and to plant fruit and vegetables in their place. In a book accompanying the project, marital distraction is only one of many sins ascribed to the lawn. Haeg and his co-writers describe the average suburban sward as a kind of vegetative perversion, force-fed on fertilisers, showered with pesticides and precious water and trimmed by a CO2-belching machine to maintain its monochromatic sheen.