ROOTED IN OUR LAWNS; EXHIBITION REVEALS MORE ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA'S INHABITANTS THAN IT DOES ABOUT FESCUE, BLUEGRASS.

Byline: Economist Newspaper Ltd.

THE American lawn is a gift for folk psychologists. The clipped, controlled sward in front of the family homestead, meticulously mown and shorn of alien growths, makes a potent symbol of suburban conformity and repressed individualism.

Moreover, the North American tradition of open, unfenced lawns running down to the roadside contrasts with the European taste for private gardens bordered by impenetrable high conifers - a neat metaphor for setting an open society against one that is happiest looking in on itself.

All this provides grist for an absorbing exhibition, ``The Lawn, Surface of Everyday Life,'' running until Nov. 8 at the Canadian Center of Architecture in Montreal - a proper city for comparing the American psyche with the European.

It reveals that over 32 million acres of lawn are cultivated in North America, and $750 million spent every year on grass seed to keep them in verdant, apple-pie order.

The perennial grasses from which today's lawns are made were unknown in North America until the European colonists came. They found the native annual grasses insufficiently nutritious for their cattle, so they imported varieties from the old country.

Among them was Poa pratensis, now better known as Kentucky bluegrass; it is still one of the most popular lawn grasses in America as well as supporting a thriving bloodstock industry.

But what are lawns for? Surrounding a house with grass is scarcely an obvious or a natural thing to do.

Indeed in 1841, in his classic ``Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening,'' the American landscape artist Andrew Jackson Downing wrote enviously of ``the unrivalled beauty of the velvet lawns of New England.''

When Charles Dickens visited New England the following year he observed: ``The well-trimmed lawns and green meadows of home are not there; and the grass compared with our ornamental plots and pastures is rank, and rough, and wild.''

The cylinder lawn mower had been invented in England in 1830 by Edwin Budding, but the first American mowers were not patented until 1868.

By then, the earth was beginning to move for American lawn lovers. In 1870 Frank Scott, a disciple of Downing, wrote ``The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds on Small Extent.'' In it, he laid down his golden rule: ``Of all the external decorations of a house, a well-kept lawn is the most essential . . .

``If one could imagine Americans to live their married lives, each pair in one home, what a pleasing variety might the changing years bring them. An unbroken lawn around the dwelling should typify the unwritten page in the opening book of earnest life.''

Already then, the lawn was being promoted as a badge of contented domesticity and virtue. In 1869 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, creators of New York's Central Park, designed a development at Riverside, Ill., where the houses had front lawns undivided by fences, one running into the next.

The fashion was promoted by the City Beautiful Movement and adopted nationally but it has not served the intended cause of unifying communities. Because the front lawn is visible and shared, families prefer to romp, picnic and play games in their private - though often smaller - back yards.

So much for the communitarian ideal. Yet this image of empty expanses of orderly grass proved attractive to corporate America when, in the second half of the century, big businesses moved their headquarters from the cities to the suburbs.

Like its residential counterpart, the corporate lawn is seldom a locus of activity and remains largely unoccupied, a green moat subject to surveillance and receptive to control - a ``power lawn,'' in the words of the Montreal exhibition guide.

By contrast the White House lawn ``has come to serve as the home lawn for the entire country . . . exploited for photo opportunities and news conferences, peace accords, treaty signings and celebrations of nationhood.''

The influence of the lawns is not always so benign. There are snakes in the grass. The show includes a display of court documents from cases where disputes over the condition of the lawn, the standard of maintenance, unsightly weeds and unneighborly fencing have led to litigation.

Many communities enforce stringent regulations on such matters, with heavy penalties for those who default on their citizen's obligation to keep the mower-blade turning.

Elizabeth Diller, one of the show's curators, says that defendants sometimes rely on the First Amendment right to freedom of expression when confronted with ``an almost fascistic control'' in certain communities.

``The lawn is a surface on which a lot of ideas are already encoded relative to conformity,'' she points out. ``And yet it is on the lawn where individual identities are played out.''

Something to ponder as, perched aboard your space-age power mowers, masters of your own turf, you do your civic duty by cutting each pesky blade down to size.

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Photo: (Color) no caption (Lawn mower)