For many years my wife Diane and I, when visiting a city which shall remain un-named to protect its reputation, took long walks through beautiful neighborhoods. Though not gated, they were set apart by their mansion-scaled homes and overwhelming acres of lawns, perhaps two to five acres per lot, boasting pure barefoot boring Kentucky bluegrass monoculture green. No sidewalks. We stayed to the road and allowed our dog Zippy to wander a leash’s length into the turf. Friendly neighborhoods, wondrous old trees, but far from natural. Walks in summer were usually accompanied by a surrounding din of commercial riding mowers and in fall by a cacophonous roar of leaf blowers. Occasionally, a friendly neighborhood dog would jog out to say hi from across an invisible fence buried in the chemical-laden turf. Not a “weed” in sight . . . but definitely not the lawns of Eden. More like “Paradise Lost.”

An estimated 40 million acres of grass “decorate” our nation, from tiny to the above gargantuan, thousands of golf courses and manicured parks, most of them barefoot friendly if you don’t mind trespassing or walking on pesticides and herbicides. One article (#NoMowDays by Christine Osborne from the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, www.deq.utah.gov) lists some frightening statistics. Lawn-mowing uses roughly 800 million gallons of gas per year. 17 million gallons are lost through spillage and evaporation from old-style gas cans. One 4-stroke lawn mower operated for 1 hour uses about what an average car will use on a 500-mile trip and the equivalent of 11 new non-electric cars running for an hour.

And let’s not get into the weeds on the results of herbicides and pesticides preserving (embalming?) a single-species lawn unmarred by irregularities like blooming pollinators. Ok, just a little: “Chemically treated - keep pets off!” Lawn to storm sewer to fish-killed rivers to algae-choked ponds . . . I’ll stop there.

What can we do? Our landscaping culture, to say nothing of the lawn-care industrial complex (LIC - is there such a thing?) is highly resistant to change. The image of a monoculture lawn that requires constant loving attention, chemicals, and oodles of water has been part of the western world’s culture from time immemorial. But the dream of a more natural, multicultural, alternative lawn which doesn’t crave chemicals and water, has begun to crop up all over the place, even in picturesque exurban housing developments — and (drum-roll) in The University. When I encountered an article describing the “native lawn project” at the Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, NY (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/realestate/native-grass-lawn.html), I knew there was hope for alternative lawns. This ongoing experiment in nurturing beautiful barefoot lawns that hardly require mowing is demonstrating how possible, how fun, and how beautiful it is to replace “traditional” lawns with regionally appropriate species of all sorts - sedges, mosses, clovers, wildflowers, pollinators galore.

Many varieties of “lawn appropriate” plants, including some grasses, are ground-hugging, mower eschewing, eye-pleasing, barefoot tickling, and endlessly fascinating. One has only to enter “lawn alternatives” in a search engine to dive into the green world of possibilities. Even Martha Stewart has entered this turf on her website.  And the Farmer’s Almanac newsletter (January 2024) presents an article describing 12 useful varieties for multi-culture low maintenance lawns. So, let your explorations begin.

But not all lawn needs to be “lawn.” Vegetable gardens are an attractive, tasty, and healthful alternative. I usually prefer walking by a garden to walking by a lawn. From an insect’s point of view, pollinator gardens beat lawns any day. Go to www.ecofaithnetwork.org and find “The Pollinator Project” under “Get Involved” and revisit last year’s EcoFaith Summit, “Cross+Pollination,” under “Resources.”

At our home, the lawnmower with its trusty Briggs and Stratton engine has become a fall mulching machine. We aim at keeping every fallen leaf at home. We water only when seedlings are begging for help. Our raking muscles are atrophying. And neither our neighbors nor the city have complained.

The traditional lawn will, of course, not disappear. It’s difficult to putt on a scraggly multi-culture green. But then look at those Scottish courses with tall heather roughs and impossibly landscaped links. Sadly, no number of articles or test plots will sway the PGA. So, not to worry, Toro. Your beautiful riding mowers won’t soon disappear from our landscape.

Paul Jacobson

Published in the Green Blades Rising Newsletter

March 2024 Edition