Column: Playing the green grass game

We joined the great green grass game this spring. Tired of trying to get grass to grow in our front lawn, we put up $2,100 and hired a landscaper to till and remove the old soil, shovel in new dirt, and hydroseed the area. As a result, we now have a lush emerald carpet from porch to sidewalk, lot line to lot line.

I’d been struggling with this small patch of real estate for years. Our front yard looked like a soiled carpet—blotches of bare earth here and there amid snarls of weeds.

My efforts to re-seed failed miserably. I emptied the shelves at Home Depot, buying lawn patch, Canadian seed for northern climates, lawn restoration kits. I once covered my new plantings with straw from the Town and Country store. Still nothing. Most of it blew down the street.

Despite applications of this variety of lawn products and plenty of water, I’d be lucky to get a few lonely strands of grass surrounded by dandelions, creeping Charlie and other weeds too ugly to identify.

I imagined passersby muttering “huh” under their breath as they compared our tawdry frontispiece with neighbors’ yards.

But now things are better. Or are they?

As I look at our new yard, I’m reminded of an environmental activist friend who once observed: “Grass. We plant it, feed it, grow it and then cut it and throw it away.”

That memory caused me to look into lawns more closely. Where did they come from, why do we nurture them so, and what are the real environmental consequences?

The sheer facts about American lawns are jaw-dropping. Our manicured and pampered grassy areas require trillions of gallons of water every year. Around the U.S., fully half the water used by homeowners is for irrigation. Here in Wausau, summertime water consumption jumps by 1 million to 1.5 million gallons a day.

We spend about $60 million a year on lawns, and use 80 million pounds of pesticides and fertilizer. Turf grass covers at least 40 million acres in the United States. That’s three times more than cash crops like corn, wheat and orchard fruit, and much more than the acreage of all the state parks in the U.S. combined. In fact, turf grass is now the largest irrigated crop in the nation.

So how did we get here?

French and British royalty are to blame. Early American homesteads grew fruit and vegetables in their front yards, but in the early 1800s, leaders of our new country, traveling abroad, were impressed with the manicured grounds surrounding European castles and estates. George Washington may have disliked cherry trees but he loved green grass. So did Thomas Jefferson, who in 1806 transformed his Monticello property into a magnificent estate look-alike.

Lawn mania grew like red fescue after that. By 1830, the mechanical lawn mower had been invented by Edwin Budding (appropriate last name.) Eleven years later, Jackson Downing published the first gardening book, advising readers to improve their lawns and thus “improve themselves.” In 1868, master planner Frederick Olmstead designed a suburb outside Chicago and required each homeowner to have a grassy front lawn that connected with the neighbor’s yard.

The trend toward perfect lawns and white picket fences was unstoppable. Lawn sprinklers started spraying in 1871, the first power mower roared into action in 1935, and low- and middle-class home building took off after World War II, enabling millions to have a lawn and mow with the well-to-do.

Soon after, chemical companies introduced fertilizers and pesticides so these new homeowners could keep their front yards Ireland green. One writer suggests that the first color TV broadcast of The Masters golf tournament in 1966 made viewers envious with its perfect fairways and pampered greens. Municipal ordinances boosted lawn mania: residents in Illinois and Florida have been fined or even jailed for failing to cut their lawns to mandated heights.

But then, along came Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, her masterpiece about chemical contamination of the earth. Published in the early 1960s, the book started a discussion about the wisdom of our zest for green lawns versus naturalized and native landscapes.

The discussion continues today.

“It’s time we rethink our obsession with manicured green spaces and consider a more sustainable option: native plants provide an ecosystem including water, food and shelter for native birds, insects and other kinds of wildlife,” wrote the president of the organization Gardens for Wildlife in a November 2022, blog. “They require less water and don’t rely on chemicals to look pretty.”

As the Colorado River—water spigot to the West-—dries up, western cities and states are taking steps to deter lawn irrigation. In Los Angeles, where water usage doubles every July and August, residents can earn up to $15,000 in rebates from the water department if they convert turf grass lawns to native plants. In California and Utah, buy-back programs reward residents who tear out lawns and plant native species. In Las Vegas, non-essential turf grass is now banned throughout the city.

A number of U.S. cities have promoted “No Mow Mays,” allowing residents to let their lawns grow as a way to support pollinators. College Park, Maryland, redid its archaic municipal codes to encourage homeowners to create more natural and native landscapes.

And individuals can make a difference. In Denver, a member of a 250-unit townhouse association realized the landscaping around the complex was not only dated but resource-intensive. He began a five-year program to eliminate 250 yards of juniper bushes, turf grass and lava rock, and replace them with native flowers and shrubs.

Results were dramatic—a drop in water use by the association from 37 million gallons a year to less than 22 million gallons, plus rebates from the local water utility.

And rewards are more than just dollars and sense. Replacing lawns with other species avoids monocultures—single-crop areas that discourage a diverse population of insects and wildlife. It also reduces all that cut grass going to the yard waste disposal site.

So, standing in front of my house with its new yard, I wonder: Did we just give in to the great green grass game? Can I resist the temptation to compare our new grass with the neighbors’? I looked up the native plants for my zip code: sunflower, joe-pye weed, St. Johns wort, black-eyed susans. Should we have done something else?

Maybe so. But then a friend walks past and says, “Nice looking yard, Jim.”

Sources:

• “Why Garden for Wildlife Supports the Anti-Lawn Movement,” Nov. 15, 2022, Kelly LaVaute
• Psychology Today, “The Strange Psychology of the American Lawn,” Austin Perlmutter, Feb. 12, 2020
• “How One Neighborhood Saved Millions of Gallons of Water with Native Plants,” Audubon, Liz Bergstrom, May 9, 2017
• “Environmental Synthesis and Communication: Front Lawns: Mowing and Growing the American Landscape, “Oct., 2021, blog by Sarai Hertz-Velasquez
• LA Times, August 7, 1986, “Green-Lawn Mania Surfaces in Turf War Against Weeds, Pets”