Shrinking the lawn

Evelyn Hadden’s book Beautiful No-Mow Yards recently reminded me that I still have a grassy lawn. The book spotlights gardeners around the country who have dispensed with lawn, replacing it with options ranging from groundcover beds to meadow gardens to paths leading between garden “rooms” full of beautiful perennials, shrubs and small trees.

Native perennials replace lawn in Robin Wilkerson's garden in Lincoln, MA

    While I’ve long aimed to eliminate lawn, I realized that I’m not ready to give up grass completely. What I’d like would be to reduce it to an area of transition between beds. I still like the look of the visually quiet mowed surface as a foreground for other more exciting plants.

Lawn makes a nice foreground

    Even a low-input lawn like ours is environmentally undesirable. Our lawn uses fossil fuels for mowing, but it’s getting by without fertilizer, weed-killers, or extra water. It’s still a pretty barren habitat for native insects and birds, compared to other ways garden space can be used.

    My lawn-reduction effort started back in the 1980s when I replaced a part of the front lawn with vinca (Vinca minor, also called periwinkle). That wasn’t so much a principled choice as an acknowledgment that grass wasn’t going to grow under the shade of the Norway maple street trees. The groundcover bed has proved to very low-maintenance, needing only occasional weeding to remove maple seedlings.

Vinca groundcover beds are neat and easy to maintain

    Next I dug out some grass around a fish pond we’d installed in a circle of lawn in the backyard. I planted perennials and dwarf trees instead, including two dwarf blue spruces (Picea pungens) that I particularly like. As they slowly enlarge, I’ll need to decide whether to move them and choose something smaller. Meanwhile, they’re doing their part by filling what would otherwise be lawn and offering shelter for moths and butterflies.

Perennials and blue spruce replace some lawn

    Two years ago I took out a big chunk of lawn when I created two perennial beds off the back deck. That and a bluestone path eliminated about 600 square feet of grass. While we had school-age kids, we wanted an open space outside the back door where they and their friends could run around. Now it’s nicer to turn that space over to flowers and pollinators, especially because it’s one of the sections of the yard that gets the most sun.

 

New beds and path where lawn used to be

    Last March I added to a bed with a sheet-composting project. As you can see, the mound of wood chips and compost is starting to settle. With continuing decomposition, after two years, it should sink to the level of the surrounding lawn. Then it will provide a rich environment for flowering perennials. I’m planning to move some there from places that have gotten too shady. If there’s space left, I can add new ones too.

Sheet composting mound is subsiding

    My next plan is to repurpose some lawn space across from the sheet composting. Outside the vegetable garden fence, I could create a cutting garden. It would be nice to grow dahlias, zinnias, and snapdragons just for enjoying indoors in a vase. Why not?

Wouldn't flowers look better?