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?

Better use for front yards

Imagine a suburban front yard. Did you picture a lawn with some shrubs along the house foundation?

Typical front yard with lawn and foundation plantings

That’s certainly the standard issue in my neighborhood. Historians say that as American suburbs developed as a place for middle class people to live outside the city, it was considered selfish to fence in your lot European style. Lawns flowing into each other without boundaries were seen as a sign of good citizenship and showed that homeowners had nothing to hide.

    I notice a few neighbors who really seem to cherish their front lawns. They’re out each spring carefully filling in bare patches with topsoil, compost, and grass seed. A lot of others pay landscape contractors to maintain a green, closely clipped, weed-free lawns. 

Contracting out lawn care

That’s trading money for time, freeing up effort and focus for activities you care more about. If you just want your front yard to look acceptably neat, that’s what you’ll get from these services.

    When we moved to our house in 1985, we had a small, scruffy front lawn that languished under the shade of the street trees. Those Norway maples sucked all the water and nutrients from the soil. Realizing that I couldn’t grow lush green grass in that situation, I replaced the lawn with groundcover. That worked visually because there’s only 10 feet of front yard from the sidewalk to the house. Now instead of a front lawn, we have a uniform bed of periwinkle (Vinca minor). It grows happily in the shade of those maples.

Periwinkle has blue flowers in April

    Recently I’m fantasizing about revamping that quiet groundcover bed to be more like some front yards I’ve been admiring. 

    Doris Lewis, who lives a few blocks away, designed her front yard garden when she moved into a newly built house in 1998. She planted a mix of trees and shrubs: white pines, upright yews, a dogwood and a multi-stemmed shadbush, and groupings of low rhododendrons. 

Doris' lawn-free front yard

Roses, lavender, sedum, and clumps of Siberian and bearded irises provide colorful accents. Doris used periwinkle, pachysandra, and creeping speedwell as ground covers, and they’ve filled in densely. I admire her design every time I pass the house.

    Ted Chapman, whose permaculture garden I visited in 2011, also skipped the front lawn in favor of a pleasing mix of shrubs, trees and perennials. Some of his front yard plantings included a walnut, a pawpaw, dwarf evergreens, jostaberries (a cross between black currant and gooseberry), and a Korean pine with edible cones. A five-flavor vine (Schisandra chinensis) with red berries in hanging clusters like grapes grew on an arch next to the sidewalk.

Ted included numerous food plants

    Most recently I toured Robin Wilkerson’s sustainable garden. 

Robin's backyard

She too had filled her front yard with shrubs and perennials, emphasizing natives such as viburnums. 

     Like mine, Robin’s small front yard was shaded by tall trees, yet what she’d planted was much more interesting than my bed of periwinkle. I came away inspired to use the front yard as more space for interesting native plants. I think the neighborhood can stand 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.

Nature or "all-natural" products?

There’s a thriving market for organic lawn care in my town. These contractors offer periodic fertilizing and even pest control with certified organic products. 

Organic lawn service

Intrigued, I met with Jim Agabedis of Minuteman Landscaping in June 2013 to see about switching to lawn care on sustainable principles.

    Jim had a lot of sensible advice to offer. Some was about switching to better-informed practices, such as letting clippings compost in place on the lawn, changing mower blades frequently so they cut rather than tear the grass, weeding by hand instead of spreading weed killer, and aerating sections of lawn where telltale plantain indicates compaction. 

Could the lawn benefit from organic methods?

Another part of his advice was about “product.” That’s where I started to feel ambivalent.
 

    Jim had a compelling story of how he decided to switch from conventional to organic lawn care. He started his business while he was still in college and built it up to 360 accounts. Then an acquaintance shared a one-page article on lawn care without chemicals, and he had an epiphany. 

     Most of his clients didn’t make the transition to organic, but he fought his way back. He said it’s worth it to avoid practices and products that could make people or pets sick. 

Not the approach Jim was aiming for

The lawns his company cares for testify to the effectiveness of his method.

     I didn’t end up hiring Jim’s company. I was looking for weekly lawn mowing informed by organic principles. He was offering something more ambitious: a commitment to a beautiful organic lawn. For me, it’s not worth the money, and it's not the direction I'm heading.
 
    I could see that Jim’s approach was better than conventional lawn care, but I balked at the idea of a lawn, or any other garden area, depending on application of lots of purchased products for health or survival. Jim proposed to apply benign products such as compost pellets and compost tea. 

Spreading compost on a lawn

That’s the organic approach I’d pursue if I had enough time, motivation, and compost to get serious about lawn care. 

     Ideally, though, the compost I’d apply to our lawn would be made up of decomposed materials from our own yard. That way I’d be imitating the natural soil cycle, where organic materials such as leaves and branches decompose on the ground and build soil. 

Organic material cycles back into soil

    I have a problem with replacing chemicals from the garden center or big box store—weed killers, pesticides, synthetic fertilizer—with pricey organic products purporting to fill the same roles. It’s better than the old way, but it’s still a paradigm we should be moving away from.

     Now I see the garden as a community of plants and animals. I aim to enrich and protect it by letting natural processes do their work freely, 

Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) blooming this week

rather than just by replacing synthetic products with store-bought “natural” ones.


This is SEG’s 100th post! Thanks for reading. It’s great to know that we share the same gardening pleasures and concerns.

Less lawn in 2017

Although there’s snow outside my windows, plans for the 2017 garden are swirling in my head. One gnawing issue is the lawn around the deck. It mostly doesn’t exist. 

Spring photos and avoiding looking straight down help disguise sparse lawn grass

     It’s tempting to imagine that this time I’ll really work on that lawn, improving the soil with compost, reseeding, and pampering the new grass with frequent watering. It’s never happened before, but this could be the year. 

     To be a sustainable gardener, though, I resolved NOT to pour resources into lawn grass. Mowing, fertilizing, and extra watering all make lawns environmentally undesirable.

Just about any other plantings are more environmentally sound than a lawn

     Last year I became aware of a major problem for this supposed grassy area—me. I walk over it constantly on my way between the garden, the house, the tools in the garage, and the compost piles in the utility area. The soil is well and truly compacted. What’s to be done? 

Clover, dandelions, plantain, and crab grass predominate in the compacted lawn

     Now that I think about it, the neighbors who maintain lovely lawns stay off them. But not walking on this section of my yard isn’t an option. I could aerate the soil, but my footsteps would soon pack it down again. I could replace the whole lawn with gravel or stone pavers. I don’t want to take on the never-ending job of keeping soil and weeds out of gravel, though, and paving the whole section seems excessive, as well as expensive.

Gravel is kept clean in this British garden. They make it look easy.

    I considered an approach I’d have thought completely philistine until recently—artificial turf. In 2014, my sister-in-law Jennifer Gilbert Asher, a garden designer and sculptor in Los Angeles, tore out the lawn around her swimming pool and replaced it with recycled artificial turf. Her reason was southern California’s longstanding water shortage. I thought she was heroic, but I still couldn’t see it for New England. That was before the Northeast’s 2016 drought.

    This month I noticed some good-looking green grass around a building owned by our electric utility. I’d walked by the place many times and never recognized that the lawn was artificial. I can see why it fooled me, because the “grass” is deep green, soft, and doesn’t look plastic. 

Artificial turf in Florida. It looks a lot better these days.

     Jennifer laid her artificial turf on a layer of sand, which I think means that her lawn doesn’t include the toxin-containing “crumb rubber” layer that’s used in artificial athletic fields. Of course, it doesn’t require mowing, watering, or fertilizing. 

     There are negatives, though. Artificial turf doesn’t provide the animal habitat offered by a natural lawn. It might heat up uncomfortably on summer days. When it came time to remove the polyethylene artificial turf, it probably wouldn’t be recyclable.

    Jennifer replaced her front lawn with a thick layer of arborist wood chips. That might be my best option for the area around the deck. I could replace part of the lawn with low-growing perennials and make some wide wood chip paths to get me where I need to go. 

More wood chip paths could be a solution

Then I could stop feeling bad about this pathetic grass and focus on plants that are more fun.

Coming soon--spring bulbs

Lawn grass--threat or menace?

Why do some plants grow well only where you don’t want them? Lawn grass in my garden keeps reminding me of this question.

    A few years ago, the water department replaced our old cast iron main water pipe, leaving a big trench in the front yard that city contractors thoughtfully filled with topsoil. Apparently they didn’t notice that the shady area they’d dug up was not lawn—it had already been converted to a bed of periwinkle (Vinca minor). 

Periwinkle replaced our sorry front lawn

Following standard practice, they sprinkled grass seed on the new soil.

    I was amazed at how well that grass grew. I tried to scoop the seed up immediately and replace it with more periwinkle seedlings, but grass still sprouted. It was several seasons before I could weed it out, plant by plant. 

    I noticed the same with grass that showed up in a perennial bed in the backyard. It migrated from the lawn by sending out underground stems toward the bed, and once it established a foothold, it was quite hard to pull out.

Wandering lawn grass  peaking from under a meadow rue

    In contrast, the grass seed I planted in the backyard barely made an effort. Each spring and fall I’d hopefully over-seed my lackluster lawn with expensive seed mixes. To help the new grass plants along, I watered frequently with a hose or rotating sprinkler. One year I even put down a wet slurry of shredded newsprint, fertilizer, and grass seed that was supposed to keep the seed moist until it could sprout in bare patches of the lawn. 

    Each time I planted, a few young blades of grass would sprout, only to die away in the heat of the summer or disappear by the next spring.

    Why was this happening? Was it just my lack of diligence in caring for the young grass? If lawn grass could co-exist happily with periwinkle and coreopsis in planting beds, why couldn’t it also compete successfully with other species in the lawn?
    .
    First, nature abhors a monoculture. I’d watched neighbors completely remove their lawns and reseed. After a year or two, unless they used weed-killers, they were back to the same mix of crabgrass and other weeds that made up my lawn.
 
 

The view from our deck--more weeds than lawn grass

    Second, my lawn’s soil is not hospitable. I don’t pamper it with compost or shredded leaves, we compact it by walking on it, and new grass sprouts don’t have the luxury of shelter from taller plants in their early days. They have little chance to establish a root system before investing energy in leaves.

    Lawn grass is the hardest plant for me to grow. I’m ready to give up. Moss thrives in our acidic soil in the shadier parts of the lawn. It looks quite nice. 

Moss is taking over a shady section of lawn

Bluestone pavers and low-growing perennials would look even better. 

In future I see more bluestone, less grass