April is typically the best month in our region to overhaul our bedraggled lawns after a long, dark and wet winter. By this time of year, the moss has made huge strides and the dandelions are in full bloom. Keeping a healthy and attractive lawn doesn’t have to be an enormous amount of work, nor does it have to be a repository for bags and bags of toxic chemicals or synthetic fertilizers that often times end up drifting off target and potentially polluting our water ways. My personal lawn (which, granted, is only 400 square feet) is lush, mostly weed free, and dark green year around. My secret is to keep it mowed as high as my mower will go (3 to 4 inches), fertilizer it only twice a year with an organic fertilizer, pull what few weeds actually find a foot hold, and water it maybe once a week in the hottest part of the summer (which is no more often than I water the rest of my yard). It’s really that simple.
But for anyone who struggles with maintaining a good-looking lawn, it is tempting to look into lawn substitutes. You may have heard of terms like “meadowscaping”, “tapestry lawns” or maybe “ecoturf” or “microclover”. These are planting schemes that use a diversity of low growing plants to create what may look like a natural and low maintenance landscape, but in reality, until they are well established, can be a heck of a lot of work. Even these types of plantings require an occasional mowing or trimming to keep them under control. Don’t be deluded into thinking that if you tear out your existing lawn and replace it with one of these plantings that you will be able to sell all your lawn equipment and never mow again. It just doesn’t work that way.
When you think about it, probably the easiest gardening task to do is to mow the lawn. It requires very little horticultural expertise. All you have to do is hop on the mower, roughly 35 times a year, and off you go. You can even let the lawn go dormant in the summer, if you wish, and it is even less work. But when all is said and done, a typical lawn of nothing but grass species, while attractive to us humans perhaps, is a monoculture that offers very little to nature, whereas a “tapestry lawn” or “meadowscape” is much more diverse and helps supports a large population of insects and pollinators, which in turn feeds the birds and other woodland creatures. And to my eye, it is a whole lot more interesting to look at.
I have always been a fan of reducing our turf areas and replacing them with a wide variety of shrubs, trees, perennials, bulbs, ground covers and appropriate hardscaping (most of you know my mantra: “there is always room for one more plant”). A diverse landscape full of both native and non-native plant material is a joy to work in and a much more ecologically stable environment. But it does require investing more time into understanding how it all works and what it takes to keep it looking attractive.
If you are looking for a lawn alternative because you really don’t like yard work, then you are far better off sticking to mowing good old grass. On the other hand if you like gardening, by all means do your research and find out what plant combinations work best for your location of sun and soil types and have a grand old time. Hopefully, after a couple of seasons, you will love what you did. If not, you can always go back to grass.
