It’s time again for that great American hand-wringing exercise, fretting over the lawn. If yours is causing grief again this year, consider an alternative: Go without.
“The lawn has almost been a patriotic badge of honor for the male of the house-to have a weed-free lawn,” says Vicki Nowicki, a landscape designer and co-owner with her husband of The Land Office in Downers Grove. “This may be changing by the reality of the environment.
“We find that in the ’90s we have outgrown the ability to have mown lawns. People take it to the extreme and have nothing else in their landscape. Everyone is now aware of the danger of chemicals used on lawns and it is an absurd way to use precious water.
“We now have 83 million lawn mowers in America not fitted with emission control devices. In the average yard mowing, we put out the same amount of carbon dioxide into the air as driving a car 25 miles.”
It will come as no surprise to learn that the Nowickis have no lawn-right down to the curb.
Homeowners give up on their lawns for many reasons, from ecological awareness to impossibly dense shade to a desire to grow more interesting plants in a small space.
Neatness counts
If you are motivated for any of these reasons to get rid of your lawn, be assured that it doesn’t have to be unkempt. But you’d be kidding yourself if you think a lawnless yard is a no-work yard. If anything, landscaping to take advantage of the natural surroundings takes three years or so before it becomes more or less maintenance free, says Nowicki.
While the Nowickis designed their home to accept a lawnless landscape, Jacquelyne Gleason, a garden designer with roots in the city, had to convert her yard to a grassless one. With a lawn, her yard didn’t have enough room for everything she wanted to grow, so she gradually did away with the turf.
“One of the main problems in city gardens is there is not enough light,” she says. “There also may not be enough soil to grow plants or there are tree roots spreading into front and side yards.”
Living close enough to the lake, Gleason’s topsoil covered a layer of sand that is great for drainage but terrible for nutrient retention. By stripping back the turf, she would have removed most of her soil as well.
Instead, she smothered the grass so it could decay and become organic matter that helped the overall soil composition. She layered her side yard with newspapers about 10 pages thick and held that down with six inches of mushroom compost and topsoil. The grass was totally killed in about a season and she was able to dig through the covering to place plants.
“One of the basic design elements is to create a curving path,” Gleason says. Instead of retaining the concrete sidewalk that came with the house, Gleason removed it and dug out a winding path, piling the dirt on the planting beds to form berms that replicate a natural change of topography.
“When you do this, you provide more soil space and more space for plants, rather than flat ground,” she says. “I wanted to establish areas for shade and sun, a break in the canopies to attract birds to the edge of a woodland situation as they would in nature. I attract a lot of migrating birds.”
Along the pathway, Gleason filled the trenches with wood chips, which decompose in about a year and have to be replenished. “They provide a spongy place to walk on, you don’t have to shovel them in winter and a lot of seedlings from my shrubs show up there, which I pot up and give away.”
Layered look
In planting, Gleason says to consider the canopy layers, from overhead trees to shrubs to perennial groundcovers, leaving no room for weeds.
“You should use trees that are a reasonable height when they reach maturity,” she says. “The other thing is to get plants with similar growth rates so one doesn’t become the dominant plant while the others suffer.”
Woody plants that Gleason recommends for small lots include Cornus kousa dogwood, Washington hawthorn and paperbark maple. “I did put in a katsura tree but found it grew very fast,” she says. “It would be nice for an area with a 20-foot width because it’s pyramidal, but my whole yard was only about 20 feet wide.
“I also prefer viburnums because they add a woodsy look with fruits that are attractive to native birds and they are very hardy. Some are salt tolerant if planted near a parkway, especially Viburnum dentatum.” She admits viburnums get bulky and large “but they are very showy. Three can be enough for a 10-by-20-foot garden.”
She also uses evergreens to provide wind screens for flowering plants. She is able to grow a Cornus florida dogwood, a plant that is typically not hardy in our climate, along a south-facing wall with an arborvitae behind it to shelter it from winter winds.
For shady situations, she recommends hardy hollies, boxwoods, P.J.M. rhododendrons and shrub forms of yews.
Perennials offer another treasure trove to the lawnless gardener. “Try to use groupings of odd number-three, five or seven plants,” she says. “Perennials offer mostly texture because their color season is brief, one or two weeks in most cases. If you want bright color, incorporate annuals that contrast in shape and color to the perennials. For vertical accents, use ornamental grasses or siberian iris. I like trumpet lilies for vertical accents, they pop up between shrubs like a ghostly presence and are very fragrant at night.”
Perennials are not low-maintenance plants, needing division or restraining in spring depending on how rampant they become.
Try herbs
“I’ve also begun to use culinary herbs in poor soil where there is enough sun, expecially against hot walls. The salvias have gray leaves and you can trim them into a nice mound.”
Suburban areas are taking a beating from environmentally sensitive writers such as Sara Stein, whose new book “Noah’s Garden” (Houghton-Mifflin, $21.95) is subtitled “Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards.” She has gone full circle from “restoring” an overgrown semi-rural homesite to abolishing the lawn mower and seeking to re-establish the plant and animal colonies that grew on the property hundreds of years ago.
The Nowickis have been championing their own version of that credo with their designs. Vicki Nowicki says there are four types of landscapes that work for those who want to abolish the lawn.
“If you have shade, put in shade-loving wildflowers and have a woodland plant community,” she says. “You have flowers primarily in spring and foliage interest like ferns for the rest of the season. If you’ve ever walked through the woods, you kind of know what this is like.”
The second type is the short wildflower meadow. “You can buy a mixed bag of flower seeds that comes with no grasses in it,” she says. “Most are in the two-to-three-foot range. It would be similar to seeding a lawn; you have to carefully water and weed for at least a year. If you get the right combination of seeds, you can produce a wildflower meadow that requires one mowing at the end of the year.”
She does not recommend the seed mixes sold in cans, saying they are not high enough in quality. And for those who want instant results, wildflower sod is now available-with an appropriately high price tag.
Back to the prairie
Her third option is a “return to the heritage of the State of Illinois, the tallgrass prairie that used to be here before we settled in. Once it is established, it needs almost no maintenance, especially in a drought year. It is similar to a meadow but it adds grasses. The flowers enhance the grasses as they change throughout the year. The beauty of this kind of grass is that it matures and has fall color of different shades of purple, bronze and gold. It can also be mowed or burned in spring.”
She did warn that this landscape gets six feet or more tall and that a permit is needed from most municipalities to burn off the dead foliage.
The fourth option is “more eclectic, creating your own combination of flowers and ground covers, the types you purchase that are hardy, bred to tolerate all sorts of conditions of light and moisture,” she says. “If they are grouped in a way to include pathways and areas of mulch where you can set up a table, they can be very attractive.”
Nowicki says her type of landscape is not low maintenance. “This is a way of making what those jobs will be-pushing a mower or picking flowers for a vase.” She quotes Worldwatch magazine, which predicts lawns will be obsolete in 40 years because they are a wasteful way of treating the landscape. The article concludes with the sentiment that we might look back and say we remember when we had lawns, and concludes they were ridiculous, weren’t they? To some, they already are.
