Mark and Sarah Squire thought they were on the cutting edge of horticultural fashion with their new yard in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Like many suburbanites bored with manicured lawns, the Squires surrounded their house with wild grass, native plants and tall flowering weeds.
But then the coyotes showed up. Readying her young children for school one morning, Mrs. Squire spotted two of the beasts sniffing around in the sandbox.
One evening, a neighbor called to warn that a 300-pound black bear and cub were hovering in a tree over the Squires’ driveway. Another day, she saw a pair of red foxes mating in her front yard.
“If coyotes can take down a cow, they can take down a 3-year-old,” Mrs. Squire frets. Determined to keep her lawn wild, she decided the only solution–short of locking the kids inside–was to get a dog. “If you have small children, an animal will go after the dog first,” she reasons.
During the last decade, thousands of homeowners have spent huge sums to rip up their perfectly groomed lawns and go rustic. Known as “naturescaping,” and promoted by trendy outdoor magazines and garden clubs, the concept involves building earth-friendly, chemical-free lawns that mirror the natural milieu.
The publisher of Wild Garden, a new magazine on the subject, estimates that 25 percent of gardeners are now using native plants. Even Vice President Al Gore has gotten into the act, pulling up nonnative ivy and trees on the grounds of his official residence in Washington and replacing them with indigenous plants.
But as many of these folks are belatedly discovering, the wild look is an open invitation to wildlife. Large carnivores, such as coyotes and mountain lions, often pop into subdivisions near rural areas. In more urban locales, the visitors include toads, snakes and deer.
“Natural landscaping is essentially adding wildlife habitat to one’s backyard,” says Scott Hygnstrom, a wildlife specialist at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. “And when you provide habitat, wildlife respond.”
Not surprisingly, none of this is a recipe for bonding with the neighbors.
Debra Bittner of St. Petersburg, Fla., blames her next-door neighbors’ natural garden for a scourge of what she calls “pukeballs”: nasty bits of half-digested seafood, crab and lobster that yellow-crowned night herons now drop in her swimming pool.
“They do it all over our deck and our chairs, and it smells,” Mrs. Bittner says. She says she’ll never understand why her neighbors, Jeff and Coleen Kremer, destroyed their once-pristine yard.
“It was so sick,” Mrs. Bittner says. “They had the nicest lawn in the neighborhood.”
Mrs. Kremer, a child psychologist, says she sympathizes with her neighbor’s concerns but doesn’t plan to revert back to her trimmed suburban turf with its plush green lawn and paired ornamental trees.
“We just want something that’s earth-friendly,” Jeff Kremer says.
But even the Kremers concede they have had their share of unwelcome wildlife encounters. After switching to the natural look, Mrs. Kremer started finding 4-foot-long black snakes on her way to the mailbox.
“The snakes sneak up on me, then I jump and scream,” she says. “I have really learned to be watchful.”
Some neighbor conflicts are severe enough to trigger lawsuits or intervention by municipal authorities.
In one case, a Chicago homeowner with a lawn full of native plants challenged a local ordinance that outlawed “weeds in excess of an average height of 10 inches.” As a result of his federal lawsuit, the city agreed it wouldn’t prosecute natural landscapers.
Chicago lawyer Bret Rappaport, who represented the homeowner in that case, has designed a brochure urging naturescapers to check out local weed ordinances and public-health laws before overhauling the yard.
To keep the neighbors at bay, he suggests starting out small and keeping a mowed border around the yard. That way, he says, neighbors will realize “you’re not a drug-dealing tree-hugger . . . just letting the neighborhood go to pot.”
In fact, letting the garden go au naturel takes more resources than homeowners might imagine. Hundreds of native plants must be purchased to fill space once covered by turf, and the cost can quickly add up. Most landscapers also recommend building concrete barriers to keep wild vegetation in some semblance of order.
Greg Rubin, a San Diego landscape designer, puts the cost of installing a wild lawn (including barriers and irrigation) at $2 to $3 a square foot, about the same as a conventional trim-and-prim lawn. On a typical half-acre lot, that amounts to as much as $60,000.
In addition, once the new lawn is in, the outgrowth of brush and weeds can be a huge maintenance hassle.
Susie Meyer, who shelled out $500 a month for a “mow and blow” service for her old manicured lawn, now pays an additional $1,200 a month for a service that prunes her natural garden and trims her native plants.
“Instead of having a lawn that gets mowed once a week, we have 800 plants in the front, and plants bring weeds,” says Mrs. Meyer, who lives in Pacific Palisades, Calif. “But no pain, no gain.”
Walter Pistone, who paid $20,000 to naturalize his yard in Vista, Calif., says he now spends as many as six hours a week pruning, as opposed to an hour a week on his old lawn.
“It’s like a jungle,” he groans.
Despite the cost, the extra work and the potential for unwanted fauna, the wild lawn look has won some very loyal converts.
“If the only thing that moves in your backyard is a lawnmower, it’s time to plant natives,” says Joy Buslaff, a Big Bend, Wis., artist who became a natural-landscape enthusiast after attending a local meeting of Wild Ones, a nonprofit organization that promotes the new aesthetic. Within weeks, she had ripped up her old yard, sowed thousands of prairie-grass seeds and dug a 25-foot pond.
