Monthly Archives: September 2008

For Part 1, click here.

So Enviro-Girl, you’ve convinced us that lawns are wasteful, unneccessary and even harmful — what should we do?

Excellent question!  If you’re sick of being a slave to the mower/fertilizer/sprinkler system/mower cycle and desire freedom, you can replace your entire lawn with some excellent and environmentally healthy alternatives.  If you need green grass for whatever reason (little kids, putting practice, croquet tournaments), you might reconsider how much lawn you want.  The average suburban back yard provides enough play space for most people — and one seldom sees side yards or front yards used for much activity — so if part of your lot is purely decorative, consider replacing the Kentucky Bluegrass with these alternatives:

*  No-mow grass.  Yes, there is such a thing!  It grows longish and tufty — think English moors, Irish hillsides, a foppish Hugh Grant haircut.  You can dig out and reseed your yard with a no-mow alternative and end your days of high maintenance yard work.  No mow grass is actually a fescue grass that grows slowly and tends to lay flat by the middle of summer.  No mow grasses can be shade or sun-tolerant and are easy to walk across.  They make excellent plantings for areas around shrubs, trees, between garden beds or between wild-growing areas and manicured lawns.  It’s a choice ideal for larger lots.

More No Mow information can be found here or here.

*  Rock Gardens work well when you’re looking for simplicity and something unique.  No, this doesn’t mean hiring AC-DC to play in your yard, this means landscaping with native stones and shrubs with some perennials or roses.  Enviro-Girl’s grandma had a rock garden along the side of her house — she used it to showcase stones she collected on her travels.  It was a gorgeous backdrop to many patio parties and didn’t require much work or watering.

For more Rock Garden information click here.

*  Garden beds.  Throughout Europe you’ll see most people put gardens in their front yards — raised beds with paths or solid plantings of perennials and annuals with a bench or bird bath strategically placed.  Garden beds work well in front yards since they tend to be smaller than back yards.  A lawn can easily be converted into a flower bed by covering the grass with 5 layers of wet newspaper and 3 inches of mulch.  Wait 6 weeks and dig in — the grass will be dead and you’ll have rich, composty soil in which to plant any combination of flowers you like.

Enviro-Girl is partial to garden beds, they are beautiful and the opportunities for design are endless — from formal to herb to to rain to cottage-style, you can plant whatever reflects your taste and climate.  Enviro-Girl has annual beds, vibrant beds, hodge-podge beds and one planted in all white-blooming perennials and bulbs.  As she gradually eliminates Mr. D’s front yard, she experiments more and more with color and texture combinations. 

Read more about Rain Gardens, Flower Gardens, and Herb Gardens.

*  Wildflower & Prairies can create a lovely spot for birds and butterflies to gather and once established, require no maintenance other than mowing every 5 years.  Even a small yard can hum with activity when planted with native flowers and grasses.  Prairie seed mixes come in all heights and can be shade, drought or flood tolerant.

Learn more about praiire and wildflower gardens.

*  And you can always pave your lawn over with a patio, put in a sport court, install a swimming pool or lay down astroturf like Mike and Carol Brady famously did.  Because lawn design?  Is really about lifestyle when you get down to it — and who wants to spend their life mowing/fertilizing/watering/mowing when you get down to it?

The American lawn — a grass carpet, manicured to uniform height and ideally Kelly Green.  The front and back and side of nearly every residential lot in American suburbs and neighborhood.  We flatten the terrain, seed the lawn and dump huge amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers to boost the nitrogen in the soil before watering and watering and watering.  The grass grows.  And then?  We fuel up lawnmowers with gasoline and cut it.

And then the lawn grows.

And we cut it.

And we fuel up our blowers and make the grass clippings go away for another week by sweeping them to the curb for the garbage collectors or to end up carried through gutters to the nearest waterway.

And we add water.

And fertilizer.

And the lawn grows.

And we cut it.

Americans invested $25 billion last year to grow something so we can cut it to a few inches.  We spend our time in this vicious cycle of water-grow-cut-dispose-water-grow-cut-dispose and then?  If anything NOT grass grows in the lawn, we poison it.

So why are lawns a good idea?

Enviro-Girl likes playing in the back yard as much as the next girl, baseball, tag and golf are all best played on grass.  But how much lawn is necessary for these things?  And how much lawn is needed for decorative purposes?

Let’s examine some of the other reasons why lawns are for fools:

*  Mowing uses gasoline (about 580,000,000 gallons a year) and leaves behind air and noise pollution.

*  Lawns require a LOT of fertilizer — and most fertilizers are petroleum based. Americans spend over $5 million on fossil fuel-derived fertilizers for lawns.

*  Perfect lawns require pesticides and herbicides which poison our water, soil and destroy diversity in the process.  Pesticides and herbicides are bad for pets, children and other plant life, too.

*  Lawn clippings end up in landfills, hauled away at the expense of local governments.

*  Lawns require watering — 30-60% of urban fresh water is used for watering lawns.

(Statistics from Redesigning the American Lawn by Bormann, Balori & Geballe, Yale University Press, 1993)

Enviro-Girl thinks we should wise up and consider what to plant instead.  Tune in next week for some alternatives.