Weekend garden chores? Remove your lawn....
Photo credit: Susan Harris
Three years ago, Susan Harris ripped out her front lawn in order to grow food.
But there wasn't enough sun, so she relocated her vegetables to containers on her sunny deck and replanted her front yard with various ground covers.
Not because she thinks lawns are inherently evil (especially if you don't load them with nitrogen fertilizers), but because she wanted to plant things that would please the human eye and invite wildlife.
This week, I visited the Takoma Park garden blogger's experiment and saw for myself how delightful a lawn-less lawn can be.
Susan, who writes for a variety of blogs, including Garden Rant, began by planting an assortment of thymes, plus mazus, clover, creeping Jenny and lots of creeping sedums.
Since then, she has found that the sedums and the creeping Jenny does best and so she has tweeked her planting arrangements.
Perhaps the easiest way to reduce your lawn, if you don't want to eliminate it all at once, is to increase the size of your borders, and Susan did that, too. Now they are deep and generously planted with shrubs and perennials.
She also put down some stepping stones because, no matter what the claims of those who market "steppable" plants, they aren't very.
Photo credit: Susan Harris
Susan also took out the grass in her backyard, too, a stretch of narrow property that extends down a hill and deep into neighboring woods. Again, she extended the borders, added stepping stones and low-growing plants that would not obscure the view.
"Then for the remaining ex-lawn, the dominant plant is Sedum sarmentosum, which arrived here as a weed. It was already thick around the dry streambed, so I removed several plugs, planted them in the bare space, and in three months the ground was completely covered. Other weeds I allowed to stay are the edible purslane and the native smartweed (Polygonum pensylvanicum), which blooms in fuchsia."
Susan removed her lawn, in part, because she doesn't like mowing. And there are plenty of arguments against using fossil fuels (gasoline) in order to maintain nature.
If you, like me, have a DH who loves his lawn and loves to fuss over it, (He rented and unloaded --and used -- an aerator last week and was sore for days.), then perhaps you can meet in the middle: Deeper borders, more island beds, slightly less grass.
After all, turfgrass does prevent erosion, cool the earth and send oxygen into the air around us.
Comments
Nice article and suggestions for groundcovers.
Posted by: Michelle Brown | November 13, 2010 8:44 AM
Delightful, indeed!
This post reminds me of the time when my little boy complained that our back yard had "too many flowers, not enough lawn!" That little boy is 25 now, so maybe it's time to expand the borders (again).
Go after it, Dahlink!
Posted by: Dahlink | November 13, 2010 8:59 AM
With a garden as beautiful as this you really need to have a proper maintenance to continue it's natural beauty.It's worth the hardwork because you will enjoy a comfortable backyard like a garden in the palace.
Posted by: Artificial Grass | November 15, 2010 10:05 PM