Since the launch of “No-Mow Month” campaigns, which experts seem to agree may do more harm than good, I was happy to see a more science-based and realistic meme appear. From the plant and seed-seller American Meadows and my friend, the groundcover author Kathy Jentz, the campaign is “Reduce Your Lawn Day.” (May 20.) Its mission is “to educate, inspire, and convert the underutilized spaces in our yards for a better world.”
This campaign is unlike most of the current anti-lawn/lawn reduction messaging, which tells us to make extreme changes – removing all the turfgrass and replacing it with some kind of meadow or “just plant natives.” Meadows aren’t for everyone or everywhere, and the “just plant natives” is sadly more frustrating than helpful.
Suggestions from the “Reduce Your Lawn” webpage.
These 10 ways ways to reduce lawn are neither daunting nor likely to cause troubles with HOAs and city ordinances. And the garden would still be a garden!
I was happy to see a company partnering with a garden writer and teacher, because her input will surely broaden the campaign’s impact.
Creating a New Island
I especially like number 4, “Carve out a flower bed to create a pollinator pit stop in your yard,” though I’d broaden it to say “Create a bed, border or island for shrubs and perennials.” That’s what I suggested to neighbors who recently asked me about replacing their large front lawn with a meadow. I conveyed the necessary bad news – that our city doesn’t allow it in a front yard, meadows don’t look great all year, and they’re a major undertaking for beginners (or anyone, really).
Instead, I suggested starting with a smaller, easier and more acceptable step – creating an island bed they could fill with a mix of natives (the husband’s hope) and full-grown plants from the crowded back-yard garden that had come with the house they bought. The island I suggested for them using marking paint is crescent-shaped and would fully enclose the trees that are currently surrounded by turfgrass, growing right up to the trunk. (Bad for trees!) I recommended my favorite method of removing grass – dig it up – and making a natural edge between the lawn and the island bed.
Not only would the island replace a good amount of turfgrass; the plants in it would do a better job of retaining stormwater on that downhill site. And the plants wouldn’t be just the usual perennials-for-pollinators but shrubs, too; I suggested ninebark, oakleaf hydrangea and our gorgeous native azaleas. It would be far more interesting to look at from any direction.
To my surprise and delight, just a week later I walked by their house and found the couple and one of their mothers digging up the lawn in their new bed, which is even larger than the one I’d suggested, and ready to install a slew of plants they’d bought or moved from the crowded back garden, with a mulch delivery coming soon.
Back when I did garden-coaching for money, I rarely found out if clients actually took my advice. Now that I’m a volunteer garden coach (for friends and neighbors) I get to see the results and this one of the most gratifying ever!
I took “before” shots like this one from the street and encouraged them to take some from inside the house – for their own reference and bragging rights but also for mine. Update coming.
Still the Best Source for Lawn Reduction/Replacement!
Published in 2012, Evelyn Hadden’s Beautiful No-Mow Yards is an outstanding source for lawn-reducers and -replacers, and I say that NOT because that’s my former back yard on the cover or because Evelyn is a friend and GardenRanter Emeritus. It’s because she shows and describes 50 “amazing lawn alternatives” that LOOK GOOD, maybe even all year long. They’re living carpets, shade gardens, meadows, rain gardens, patios, lay areas, ponds, xeric gardens, edible gardens, and stroll gardens.
She includes a chapter about “smarter lawns” of blue grama, fine fescue, dwarf mondo, or sedges, and “freedom lawns” with clover, violets and more. And of course, how to remove lawn.
Also included is something missing in most anti-lawn messaging – how to DESIGN an “eco-friendly garden.” That’s important because most people care about beauty – for their own enjoyment and that of their community – and will continue to care about beauty no matter how often they’re told they shouldn’t.
Evelyn also covers maintenance, and profiles lots of groundcovers and taller plants to consider.
Her next book is a deep dive into a particularly manageable and gratifying lawn-replacement project – “Flip the strip!” I’ve found creating gardens out of boring hellstrips to be smaller, do-able projects with tons of pay-off – for me and the many passersby who express their appreciation.
So for Reduce Your Lawn Day (May 20), know that you have lots of OPTIONS.
My parting shot is this photo of my former front garden, which reminds us that not all groundcovers can really be stepped on, or be expected to thrive in any climate. The current owners of this mosaic of groundcovers have replaced it with – can you guess? – turfgrass.
This is only about the UK, which is different in many respects but has that no-mow message everywhere too.
Short grass here has a long history, from prehistoric forests with grazed glades where fallen trees had let light and grazing animals in. And many birds need and like it – they eat worms they access on lawns.
Charles recently for fun mowed the name Veddw into the lawn and I’ve been amused to see birds finding their way into the mown letters for food.
Great tips on ways to decrease lawn. It’s a shame about your former front garden being turned back to turf. Not sure why people have to have lawn. In our semi-desert climate they just don’t make sense. Unfortunately, people are turning to faux turf with it’s brilliant green looking quite bizarre mid winter.
Susan: can you name some of the plants that were in your circular front garden? It’s (it WAS) so charming.
Here’s a record of it: https://gardenrant.com/2008/09/reviewing-stepa.html
My husband mows a strip in our field right in front of the next boxes he puts out for swallows and bluebirds. They need short grass to find the insects they prefer. It’s not lawn and it’s mown only 2-3 times in May and June. After that the birds have fledged and don’t need the short grass. Sometimes mowing HELPS wildlife.
We also have to mow some around the house to keep tick numbers down. It’s a balance.
Regarding the “beautiful no-mow yards” photos, I would only like to gently point out that hardscape kind of misses the entire point. Yes, it supposedly encourages people to get into the garden, but too often it is promoted by the installers (more $$) and winds up dominating the space. It’s all about the land and the plants, right? Just a little path for us humans.
I had to check to see whether I actually own Beautiful No-Mow Yards or just have borrowed it from the library so many times I thought I owned it. I think I actually need to buy it. Or just borrow it again.
We’ve done less mowing and not mowed at all in some parts of our yard for many years, and have really enjoyed the results both visually and with “volunteer” plant diversity. Lots of little bluestem invading our “lawn”! But this is our first spring with a dog (tick-magnet and rabbit hunter -which are overlapping issues) in the family, so we’re going to have to do more mowing even in the parts that are just wildflowers, and reduce the wild rabbit habitat options a bit. In New England Lyme disease is a constant threat. So I’m having to rethink yard design for being sustainable while also being safe and dog-friendly, and not setting up the poor rabbits to be terrorized. And our front yard was dug up for a water line replacement. Ugh.
(Just thinking, hardscaping doesn’t have to be expensive if it uses reclaimed materials. My local BuyNothing group often has used and extra landscaping materials, and when I was a kid my family built a really nice patio from bricks we salvaged -with permission- from an old building. This was back in the 80s, before reclaimed was cool. Moss and weeds grew in the sand between the bricks, which my mom made me dig out with a screwdriver but which -if it were my patio now- I would leave and add tread-able plants intermittently to merge hardscape with plantscape.)
Great post Susan — and well done Kathy and American Meadows for providing a working alternative to the reductionist Garden-by-Meme. —MW
The ecological problem is not with having a “lawn” the problem is with the monoculture of turf grass that was created by the using herbicides to kill all the dicot vegetation, leaving only the monocot species (that is grass.) Also, applications of pesticides are often used to wipe out any insect larva at the roots; this includes those beloved fireflies. If the “lawn” is left on its own accord, to host multiple species of low growing plants, without any use of chemicals, the thing can be mowed and create a nice carpet for the kids to play on, catch fireflies, collect buttercups, and the birds can forage for grubs and worms. When I was a child in the 1950s our lawn was what they called crabgrass. It was a composite of chickweed, knotweed, henbit, dandelion, buttercups, violets, sheep sorrel, plantains, smartweed, and hawkweed to name a few. It made for interesting playthings as we collected bouquets, and made salads that we fed to our dolls. We had a push mower (not gas) which never seemed to wipe out our favorite “flowers”. You do not need tall meadows of wildflowers or expensive redos to satisfy the the softening of the harsh ecosystem of turf grass. Prostrate vegetation with plenty of larva in the ground, that’ll do the trick.
Excellent points – more “freedom lawns,” please!