September 8, 2006

Seeing the Yard for the Grass

By SAM KEAN

J. Michael Dixon always had a more hands-off view of the lawn than did his wife, Jane.

Every spring they would discuss it. "I'd say, 'Look at all these wildflowers,'" says Mr. Dixon, a psychology professor at Hazard County Community and Technical College, in Hazard, Ky. "Nature should not be interfered with."

Mrs. Dixon would listen, says her husband, but "then she'd say, 'Go cut the grass.'"

Then she died of breast cancer last November after a decade of surgeries,

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