Inconvenient clover

Speaking this week to the Wellfleet Gardeners, a wonderful group of serious gardeners on Cape Cod, reminded me of one of my favorite stories about how commercial influences form our ideas about the plants around us. Wellfleet readers, I apologize for repeating what you just heard. Tune in next week when I should be able to describe the beginning of the sheet composting experiment.

     After World War II, Americans embraced what a team of environmental scientists at Yale has termed the Industrial Lawn, defined as closely mowed, continuously green, and ideally free of weeds and pests. The Industrial Lawn requires regular inputs of water, fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. Energy costs are high, not just for mowing but also for synthesizing and transporting the chemicals used.

Industrial Lawn: turf grass only

     Why did we Americans embrace this Industrial Lawn, and why right after World War II? One reason was the development of an herbicide, 2,4-D, for use by the military (If this name sounds familiar, it might be because of Agent Orange, which contained both 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, another phenoxy herbicide). During the war, chemists in England and the US raced to develop an herbicide that could wipe out German potato crops and Japanese rice, to starve out the enemy.

Spraying herbicide over Vietnam

     To their disappointment, potato and rice plants turned out to be resistant to 2,4-D. It did kill broadleaf plants in turf, though, without killing the grass. The Scotts company realized this could be a goldmine. In 1947, Scotts started selling 2,4-D in their Weed and Feed combination—herbicide plus fertilizer. Scotts had just one problem. Their new weedkiller killed clover.

     Before the war, grass seed mixes included clover seed. White or Dutch clover originated in southeastern Europe and Asia minor. It’s spread all over the world because it works so well for pastures—and lawns. I like to use clover to fill in bare patches in my lawn. Rabbits love it, and I think it’s keeping them from wiping out my perennials.

Rabbits like clover-photo ibm4381

     Clover is a legume that fixes nitrogen in the soil, in effect making lawn fertilizer. It stays green all summer; it’s easy to grow, drought tolerant, and pest free. It aerates the soil. It stays low. Dog urine doesn’t cause it to discolor; and it attracts bees and beneficial wasps that control leaf-eating insects. It sounds like an asset for any lawn, right? Before the war, that’s how it was marketed.

To me, clover looks good in a lawn

     But because of 2,4-D, Scotts changed their marketing approach. They told consumers that clover was a weed. That idea persists up to the present time; lawn care contractors still cringe at the sight of clover in the lawn.

Making killing clover a selling point

     Although we like to think that advertising doesn’t affect us, this kind of messaging has an impact. Don’t be fooled. I’m trying to grow less lawn and convert the space to more environmentally friendly uses. No matter how much lawn you like to maintain, though, don’t let anyone convince you that clover shouldn’t be part of it.

Paradigm shift needed

One characteristic of the post-World War II era was cheery optimism about the potential for solving problems with synthetic chemicals. Perhaps the best example was DDT, which was going to rid the world of insect-borne disease. Look how well that turned out.

Spraying DDT over Oregon forest, 1955

    In the fifties and sixties, we all tended to trust safety and effectiveness claims for household and garden chemicals. Synthetic fertilizer was going to make soil stewardship irrelevant by spreading unlimited quantities of the basic plant nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. We learned that doing this destroys soil fertility while causing dead lakes and rivers as fertilizer runs off fields and lawns into nearby waterways.

Fertilizer runoff causing algae overgrowth and eutrophication

    There was 2,4-D, invented as a defoliant during the war and brought home as Scotts Weed and Feed to eliminate broad-leaved weeds from American lawns. 

     Imagine what would have happened if Scotts had brought home Agent Orange from the Vietnam War—by then, public attitudes toward war materials had shifted significantly. Since the 1940s, 2,4-D has taken us down a path toward increasing insistence on monocultural lawns, with all the water and chemical inputs necessary to maintain them.

Grass doesn't grow this way naturally

    The 1970s brought Roundup (glyphosate), marketed by Monsanto as a benign product to spare us the trouble of bending down to pull weeds. 

Roundup is ubiquitious

By the 1980s, genetically engineered “Roundup-ready” crops resistant to the herbicide enabled spraying this product on agricultural fields. Farmers took up the practice on a massive scale. As a result, we’re all eating Roundup, which a United Nations agency has declared a probable human carcinogen, a hormone disruptor, and a contributor to antibiotic resistance.

    Neonicotinoid pesticides, my garden nemesis, are the next in this series of chemicals first thought to be harmless. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the most commonly used pesticides were organophosphates, which had high toxicity for humans, other mammals, and birds. Neonics are safer for the people applying them, and since the nineties they have dominated the market, used for treating both seeds and growing plants. 

     Now we know that neonics are very persistent in plant tissues and toxic to many insects, including honeybees and other pollinators. 

Neonics poison pollinators

I recently learned that some insects have already developed resistance to neonics. That’s the predictable result of widespread use of any pesticide, analogous to development of antibiotic resistance in treated bacteria.

    Maybe we can stop thinking about living systems in such simplistic ways. Instead of charging in with blunt instruments like herbicides and pesticides, we need to think about what keeps natural systems in balance. Diverse populations and healthy growing conditions help plants to weather the onslaught of pests and diseases. Every organism has its place in a natural community.

Biodiversity protects plant health

    Insect populations are dropping worldwide. We need insects if we’re going to continue living on earth. Times have changed since the fifties. We’ve stopped watching TV Westerns. Let’s also stop thinking of plants and insects as good guys versus bad guys.