Lawns Don’t Have to Be Terrible
You don’t need a poisoned monoculture to have pretty green space
It is not news that the traditional American lawn is an ecological disaster. The classic expanse of identical non-native green blades (often in a perfectly rectangular space) is actually about as far from “nature” as a growing thing can be. Monoculture lawns are deeply watered and heavily fertilized, then poisoned with weed-killers, in a never-ending cycle of waste and destruction.
I am here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way.
When we moved here, neither my husband nor I had ever really had lawns before. Gardens, yes — we had a spectacular garden at our last house, which my husband is still trying to replicate here — but grass? Nope.
This wonderful home featured big swaths of green grass in both the front and back yards. Which we had no idea what to do with.
Our first approach, which I don’t entirely recommend, was to just ignore it. We were very busy when we first moved, well actually for really the whole first year, well actually we’re still pretty darn busy nearly four years later…but we didn’t even own a lawn mower. So we just let it all go wild. It grew tall and rangy and weedy, before finally dying back in the winter.
