Gerry Grupe is planning a party-a lawnmower demolition party, to be precise. It`s scheduled for next spring, when the newly-planted wildflowers surrounding his Batavia home are in bloom, and the prairie grasses he seeded this summer are sprounting.
”I`m going to bring friends over who have been watching this project with interest. My neighbors are getting invites too,” says Grupe. They will all get a tour of the new prairie, and then, he jokes, ”I`ll get a sledgehammer out and beat the living hell out of the old lawnmower.”
Grupe is one of a handful of mavericks who have abandoned the pursuit of the perfect lawn. Fed up with mowing, discouraged by drought, smitten by gardening or worried about the impact of lawn chemicals and power mowers, these homeowners are exploring new turf. From pebbles to perennials, they are changing the way they landscape their homes.
Grupe, an insurance agency owner, was not always the kind of guy who planted buffalo grass in his front yard. For years he tended a typical green lawn in Naperville. ”That`s when you see your neighbors,” Grupe says, ”when you`re out mowing the lawn.”
But the memory of the prairie around his boyhood home on a farm in Park Ridge was never entirely out of mind. When he purchased the Batavia house set on 3 1/2 acres of unsodded land in March, Grupe decided to go for the gold of native Indian grass rather than Kentucky blue.
Grupe enlisted the Natural Garden, a nursery in St. Charles, to landscape his property. The front yard, to be seeded in August, will be six-inch-tall buffalo grass. The clumpy Western grass requires no mowing or chemicals, and is intended to blend amicably with neighboring lawns. The remainder of the property will contain some 200 native plants, trees and shrub species with such colorful names as white turtlehead, rattlesnake master, purple love grass and little bluestem.
Because prairies require periodic fires for seed germination and weed control, Grupe`s one big maintenance chore will be to burn it one day in March, rather than mow it through the summer. For Grupe, it`s a fair tradeoff. ”Only 1 percent of our natural (Illinois) remains,” he says. ”We`ve been disturbing the environment too long. It`s time to put something back.”
Anyway, adds Grupe, ”If I didn`t do this I`d be riding a John Deere every weekend. I`ve got better things to do.”
Most Americans love lawns. We mow, weed, edge, dethatch, aerate, water, fertilize and otherwise pamper them. We lavish money on our lawns, spending $6.4 billion annually for lawn care products.
Lawns are the connective tissue of our suburbs, great green ribbons that unite our communities visually and require us to cooperate to achieve a common goal: an uninterrupted, parklike setting for our homes. The Great American Lawn is a shared aesthetic, a fashion as ingrained in our culture as the coat and tie.
Perhaps it was the conformity of his neighbors` yards that moved Ernest Hemingway to indict Oak Park as a city of ”broad lawns and narrow minds.” It wasn`t a generous sentiment about his home town, and he might have felt differently had he hung around long enough to meet Philip Kier.
Kier`s entire Oak Park front yard is a vegetable garden, set in the middle of a block of broad lawns.
Kier, an engineer and lawyer, didn`t plant the garden in his front yard as a political statement about grass or conformity. He put it there because that`s where the sun was. Over 20 years the little vegetable patch grew until it reached the front sidewalk and adjoining lawns.
In summer, the 24-by-42-foot garden is a neat rectangle of lettuces, bok choy, carrots, Chinese pea pods, peppers and herbs, decorated with folk arty signs and a wooden Miss Muffet tending her sheep. ”Because it`s in the front,” says Kier, ”I feel an obligation to keep it neat.”
Pilferage can be a problem when your front yard is a vegetable patch, so he plants the tempting items-raspberries, melons and tomatoes-n the back.
Kier admits to a distaste for mowing. ”I have an old hand mower because I didn`t want to pollute the atmosphere,” he says, ”so it was hard work. That was one factor,” he says of his decision to reduce his lawn to a couple of narrow strips. But the main reason their front yard is a vegetable garden is because it suits the personal interests of both Kier and his wife CarolJean, a social worker. He loves to garden, and she is a self-described
”serious cook and serious vegetable eater.”
Despite Hemingway`s take on the locals, the Kiers` neighbors haven`t been the least bit narrow-minded about the garden.
”One woman came by during the early years and was really hostile,” says Philip. ”But that was the only incident where that happened.”
”Everyone else kind of likes it,” adds CarolJean. ”People bring their children to see it . . . and teachers come by with their classes as a nature lesson, cheerfully misidentifying vegetables as they go.”
”People walking to work like to see how it changes from day to day,”
Philip says.
A matter of taste
Not everyone`s personal landscaping vision meets with the same acceptance as the Kiers`. Lawsuits can fly when a homeowner decides to depart from the norm.
Take Donna and Glenn Crylen. When they bought a new home on a corner lot in Burbank several years ago, Donna says, ”My husband screamed, `You had to buy a corner house with all the grass.` He hates to cut grass and had just broken his elbow. But I had a fantastic idea.”
Donna covered the unsodded front yard of her 80-by-100-foot lot with plastic, then spread over it smooth, rounded river rock and marble gravel. She planted small shrubs and flowers and trees among the rocks.
At least one of the Crylens` neighbors did not think Donna`s landscaping idea was fantastic. In a neighborhood of neatly manicured lawns, the rock landscape was an irritation to the anonymous person who complained to Burbank officials. The city cited the Crylens for violating an ordinance requiring grass or greenery on the parkway and the lawn. When the Crylens resisted, a lawsuit followed. The dispute was eventually settled out of court when the couple removed the rocks from the parkway, while keeping their front yard`s landscape intact.
”By the end, I was very sad and depressed,” Donna Crylen says of the experience. ”I thought if city officials ever came to my house it would be to congratulate me. I was saving water when everyone else was suffering from the drought. . . .”
The city yard
While the Great American Lawn exists in cities too, the pressure to conform is not as powerful as it is in the suburbs. Many city dwellers prefer to fill their front yards with ground cover and perennials.
Few, however, have eradicated grass from their landscapes as thoroughly as Susan Crawford has.
Crawford, a screenwriter, was pragmatic in planning the landscape for her Lakeview lot. Parking was impossible, so why not put a driveway right up the middle of her front yard? Not a crass concrete one, but a pebble drive that funnels into a path to the front door and makes ”a friendly sound” when you walk on it.
On either side of the driveway/path, Crawford planted a woodland garden. Redbud trees shade rhododendrons, sweet woodruff, May apples, trillium and Solomon`s seal.
When it was done, Crawford`s front yard accommodated both her passion for gardening and her automobile. Her back yard, however, was a bigger challenge. It had to accommodate her passion for gardening and her two black Labrador retrievers.
Grass was not an option.
”I was so disgusted with the fact that our grass never looked good,”
Crawford says. ”It was always really shabby-looking” from children and dogs running on it, she says.
When she saw the grassless yard of Chicago landscape designer Jacqui Gleason, Crawford says, ”I was ready to get rid of that grass.” Gleason`s company, Jacqui Rose, assisted her in designing the back garden.
”A lot of these paths,” she says of her back area, ”follow the dog routes. They were clearly visible in our crummy grass,” she says. ”I thought, `For the preservation of my garden, why don`t I just lay it out around where the dogs take their runs?` ”
Crawford dug up the soil in the paths and heaped it into piles to form little islands throughout her back yard, then filled the excavated trenches with wood chips.
The result is a string of garden islands, many with themes: roses on one, Japanese plants on another, strawberries on another. A large vegetable island lines the north section of her yard.
Crawford admits her garden requires far more time than mowing the same yard would require. ”But I am passionately fond of gardening. It`s the most wonderfully tranquilizing thing-to garden,” she says.
A new aesthetic
As suburbs and their attendant lawns sprawl into the 21st Century, environmentalists question the viability of continuing America`s lawn tradition. In addition to air pollution caused by power mowers, lawn chemicals present potential for ecological damage.
”Mowed lawns are abnormal,” says Pat Armstrong of Naperville, an ecologist and prairie authority. ”Nature does not like monocultures. Nature likes variety . . . hundreds of species of things all interacting. When you have a monoculture with acres and acres of one plant you have to expend tremendous amounts of labor and fossil fuels to maintain that.”
Armstrong and Vicki Nowicki, a Downers Grove landscaper and educator, recently formed a branch of the Wild Ones, a Wisconsin-based organization devoted to promoting alternatives to traditional lawns.
While those alternatives include prairies and perennial gardens, simple solutions are available for those who lack green thumbs.
Nowicki points to the parkway of her own home as an example of a low-maintenance approach with satisfying results. She covered it with wood chips, then planted perennials, including buttercups, garden phlox, yarrow, coneflowers and lilies.
She points out that grass has its place. ”If you have small children you`d want a small or moderate-sized area of grass. But that still doesn`t mean you have to cut it with a power mower or treat it with chemicals.”
For any real change to occur, Nowicki suggests, we must re-evaluate our tastes as a country of lawn lovers.
”It`s our values. What do we value as being beautiful and good? When we decide that, that`s how our society will choose its landscapes.”
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For information about the Wild Ones, call 708-983-8404
