Few things give me as much pleasure as spending time on my front porch. In all kinds of weather I love to sit here, where I am as I write this, and enjoy the show: the change of seasons, the play of sunlight on foliage, the antics of the squirrels and chipmunks, the call of songbirds, the perfume of flowers. Such peace.
All too often, however, the peace is shattered. With fearful regularity, a small battalion of gardeners swoops down on the neighborhood, unloads the materiel and ordnance of lawn care - mowers, edgers and blowers, with their noisy, smelly, and highly polluting two-stroke internal combustion engines, along with sacks of fertilizers, weed killers and pesticides, and proceeds to wage war on crabgrass, insects, dandelions, and any blade of grass which isn't precisely the same height as every other.
Lately, I've been pondering the tyranny of grass, the cultivation of which is, after all, an unnatural act. It's such a ubiquitous feature of suburban life that we tend to assume this is what nature intended. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Grass is the least green thing you can plant.
The American lawn, that lush carpet of green that is the icon of suburbia, didn’t always exist. Heretical as the thought may seem, this uniform swath of emerald is a complete fabrication, something not found in nature.
Entirely the creation of mankind’s desire to control nature – a futile task, if ever there was one, lawns have been around for a long time. Just how long is a matter of conjecture, but one of my favorite theories on the origin of lawns was put forth in the musical comedy, The Apple Tree.
In Act One, based on Mark Twain’s The Diary of Adam and Eve, we find a somewhat testy Adam listening to yet another in a long list of helpful suggestions from the garden’s other two-footed tenant:
EVE I’ve been thinking . . . we’re different from anything else on earth. And our home should be different.
ADAM I thought it was.
EVE And today I had the feeling that the grass around our hut should be different from all other grass.
ADAM Different how?
EVE Shorter.
ADAM How could it be shorter – unless it was . . . cut?
Somehow, we have come to accept the inevitability of lawn care. We love our lawns. We must – why else would we devote such vast amounts of time, effort and expense to cultivating an estimated twenty million acres of this industrial monoculture. We enthusiastically water, weed, fertilize and mow in pursuit of a more perfect lawn than our neighbors.
Yet lawns are an environmental nightmare. The millions of tons of chemical fertilizers and weed killers that we apply have high environmental costs. They wash off our lawns and run into our wells, streams, and lakes, wrecking havoc with aquatic ecosystems, and turning up in our food supply and drinking water.
Power motors contribute to air pollution and global warming. One lawn mower emits as much CO2 as a dozen or more cars. Grass clippings that are bagged and hauled away clog our landfills, and the watering of lawns depletes critically scarce water supplies.
In our zeal to eradicate the lowly dandelion we blithely pour poison onto the soil and then watch our children and pets gamboling on that grassy patch of green we call the back yard, all the while feeling grateful to be raising our family in the safe, healthy, leafy suburbs. It doesn’t even occur to us that there might be an alternative.
Sustainable alternatives
There are many ways to reduce the negative environmental impacts of our lawns and gardens.
One of the easiest is to reduce the size of the lawn. Instead of automatically planting grass everywhere, we could plant the perimeter of the property as a wildflower meadow, which only needs to be cut once per year. Other areas can be planted with ground covers like pachysandra or myrtle, which, once established, need virtually no care or watering. There are dozens of different types of ground covers available to suit different needs. Your local garden center is likely to have a selection that is suited to the local climate. Many more varieties are available on the Web.
What about growing food instead of grass? You might consider turning part of your property into a vegetable garden. Growing some of your own food can be highly satisfying, and there’s nothing like the taste of freshly picked produce.
Reducing the size of your lawn means less water, fewer chemicals, and less maintenance. And as your lawn gets smaller, cutting the grass with a push-type reel mower becomes quite practical. Push mowers produce no pollution, and the soft whirring sound they make as the blades scissor the blades of grass if infinitely more pleasant to listen to on a Sunday afternoon than the roar of a power mower.
Lawns are also very thirsty. Have you looked at your water bill lately? From 2002 to 2007, municipal water rates have increased by an average of 27 percent in the United States.
The amount of water our lawns and gardens consume is related not only to the size of our lawns, but also to the type of plants we cultivate. As landscaping is extremely climate sensitive, choosing plant species that are native to your geographic location will cut down your water usage. These plants have adapted, through evolution, to thrive in local soils and on the amount of rainfall typical to the area.
For parts of the garden that do require irrigation, there are other ways to conserve water. Watering early in the morning reduces the evaporation that would occur in the heat of the day, when as much as half the water sprayed into the air never reaches the ground. For shrubs and flower beds, drip irrigation, which applies water directly to the roots, eliminates waste through runoff and evaporation and keeps plants well hydrated using much less water.
For larger properties, consider a smart irrigation controller, which monitors weather data from satellites and automatically calculates watering requirements for different zones of the garden. If the controller knows rain is likely on Wednesday, it won’t water the lawn on Tuesday.
Preserving wildlife habitat is another sustainable landscaping choice. The suburbs were shaped by zoning regulations that favor large building lots. This came about partly from a desire to preserve open space. Unfortunately, large-lot zoning had the opposite effect. Dividing up the landscape into quarter-acre or half-acre (or larger) lots effectively eliminates the natural habitat for thousands of species.
By minimizing the hegemony of turf grass we can restore some of that lost habitat while making our yards more beautiful, more interesting, and easier and cheaper to maintain. And choosing plants that provide food and shelter will attract a variety of colorful songbirds, adding interest and delight, and keeping insect populations in check without the use of insecticides. And then we can really enjoy relaxing on the front porch.
