Make Your Lawn into a Garden
A lawn is a lot of work. If you’re committed to having a good lawn, now’s the time to get to work. On the other hand, it’s also a good time to transform a demanding lawn into a beautiful garden. You can design a garden to grow vegetables, herbs, perennials, annuals and native plants.
There are good reasons to cut out grass. Americans manage about 30 million acres of lawn, spending $800 million on grass seed every year. Between two and a half and five million tons of fertilizers are spread on lawns, as well as 70 million pounds of pesticides. Grass clippings consume 25 to 40 percent of landfill space. Gas-powered lawn equipment emits more hydrocarbons than cars per hour of operation. Mowers emit 10 times as much, string trimmers 21 times and blowers emit 34 times more than cars. Thirty percent of water consumed on the East Coast is used for watering lawns.
Gardens skip many of those costs and bring far more benefits: insects, butterflies, birds and wildlife. Rather than grass, all those creatures prefer native plants that have evolved and adapted to our climate since the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.
The life cycles of mutually evolving plants and animals support and depend on each other. For example, the zebra swallowtail butterfly larva feeds only on leaves of the paw paw tree. Larvae of the monarch butterfly feed on milkweed. You must have larva food plants for these butterflies to proliferate. Yet both those larval plants, milkweed and paw paw, are traded for lawn or harmed by lawn-sustaining practices.
Pollinators like hummingbirds, bees, butterflies and other insects assure their own survival while helping plants reproduce. The rewards of native plants include improved environmental quality, landscape sustainability, improved aesthetics and water quality and a more balanced ecosystem to increase wildlife by providing nuts, berries, seeds, fruit and nectar.