ABSTRACT
‘Treading the lawn’ was a practice well-understood in a time when using strewing herbs such as chamomile, mint, lavender, pennyroyal, meadow sweet and marjoram on floors of houses was undertaken in all the very best households. The word ‘lawn’ itself is regarded as having a number of potential origins from around the fourteenth century; perhaps ‘launde’ in Old French, ‘laund’ in Old English or possibly ‘lawnd’ in Middle English; each of these being used to describe an open and pastured glade especially within woodland. In seventeenth-century France, a very refined and extensive type of lawn known as tapis vert emerged. Single species forb lawns have been popping up on and off all over the place, especially where temperate grasses tend to struggle or are inappropriate. There is a growing list of lawn-tolerant forbs that can be more suited to the location than grasses, and to the purpose of the individual lawns themselves.
