Using Native Grasses for Your Lawn

"Another pleasant Valley Sunday, charcoal burning everywhere...serenade the weekend squire who just came out to mow his lawn."

This tongue-in-cheek ode to suburbia by the 60's rock group The Monkees is still true today. But those American dream perfect lawns certainly are not very good for the environment, and let's face it, they're boring to look at.

There was a story in the local news here in St. Louis about the problems between a local woman and the suburban township that she lived in. The woman was a writer for an environmental magazine and was trying to make her yard as "green" as possible. She stripped her lawn of the non-native grass that was growing there and, instead, planted some natural plants and grasses that were native to Missouri. She eliminated her need for herbicides and pesticides and also her need to water and mow the grass every week. She added a few wildflowers and had achieved a beautiful, ecologically balanced yard. But not everyone thought so. Soon after she began receiving "warning" letters that she had a lot of "weeds" growing on her property and would be given a citation if she didn't take care of the problem. After several back and forths, the property owner finally reached an uneasy peace with the city inspectors, but they told her that they would be "watching" her in the future.

It seems that a lot of communities are still stuck in that 1950's mentality when it comes to lawns. Grassy monocultures (lawns) account for half of a typical household's summertime water use. They are barren of birds and butterflies and any other kind of insect life, need artificial life support in the form of large does of herbicides and pesticides to look their best, and require regular grooming with noisy fossil-fuel burning machines.