My father, like myself, was never one to cut down a tree. So the longleaf pines that were already there grew, slowly, through their Dr. Seuss-like grass stage, through their pipe-cleaner-esque adolescence, fanning out into gangly young adults, gaining a little bit of girth and height each year. The backyard and one side was pine straw, with spotty patches of failed grass, a small graveyard of the pines. The side yard was mostly the eponymous white sand of the sandhills. We had a yard, including some stunted azaleas and crepe myrtles flanking the immediate three-foot perimeter of the house, but not a lawn. That space made me who I was.
After the neighbors replaced the nearby woods with an oversized house and lawn, annihilating a small ecosystem, the birds at our bird feeder grew fewer and fewer, and their species changed to hardier, more urbane types: sparrows, robins, some cardinals, and an occasional cedar waxwing. To this day, I wonder what happened to the goldfinches. There were plants in that patch of forest; rare plants, like the elusive sandhill lily and the tiny five-petaled blankets of sandhills pixie-moss, that were lost, further endangering these already brow-beaten species found only in this part of the world. Meanwhile, the neighbors’ lawn, like many lawns, introduced plants that we only too late realized had great potential to be invasive, such as Bradford pear and Chinese privet. What is lost to this carelessness cannot be regained. As we build more and more of our houses with lawns, we deprive ourselves of both natural signposts and crucial ecological elements.
The turf grass lawn, more than white-picket-fence Levittown Cape Cods, perhaps even more than the urbanist bugbears of highways and tunnel-vision car travel, renders entire landscapes, entire whole places, homogenous carpets of green. The botanical term for this is monoculture, an ecological system dominated by one plant. It is an extreme situation, one that is, despite numerous horticultural catalogs full of annuals and perennials, limited in its diversity. For all the talk in the suburbs around being closer to nature, the nature in question is both ersatz and an ecological horrorshow.
“Lawns … displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term,” the Roaming Ecologist writes: “no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage.”
Lawns, by acreage, are the nation’s largest irrigated crop, surpassing corn. Lawns consume resources, including fresh water (especially in those lawns cultivated in desert climes), fertilizer, pesticides and other chemicals, fossil fuels for mowing, and a mind-numbing amount of time, on an immense scale. Much hand-wringing goes on about the use of pesticides in industrial farming and the effect it has had on the worldwide population of pollinators, but less about its destructive use in lawn care. Lawns have introduced some of the country’s most invasive species, including English ivy, Japanese and Chinese wisteria, and decorative trees such as princess tree, Bradford pear, and mimosa. Second only to deforestation, invasive species are the largest threat to the world’s biodiversity.
And all this for what?
After the neighbors replaced the nearby woods with an oversized house and lawn, annihilating a small ecosystem, the birds at our bird feeder grew fewer and fewer, and their species changed to hardier, more urbane types: sparrows, robins, some cardinals, and an occasional cedar waxwing. To this day, I wonder what happened to the goldfinches. There were plants in that patch of forest; rare plants, like the elusive sandhill lily and the tiny five-petaled blankets of sandhills pixie-moss, that were lost, further endangering these already brow-beaten species found only in this part of the world. Meanwhile, the neighbors’ lawn, like many lawns, introduced plants that we only too late realized had great potential to be invasive, such as Bradford pear and Chinese privet. What is lost to this carelessness cannot be regained. As we build more and more of our houses with lawns, we deprive ourselves of both natural signposts and crucial ecological elements.The turf grass lawn, more than white-picket-fence Levittown Cape Cods, perhaps even more than the urbanist bugbears of highways and tunnel-vision car travel, renders entire landscapes, entire whole places, homogenous carpets of green. The botanical term for this is monoculture, an ecological system dominated by one plant. It is an extreme situation, one that is, despite numerous horticultural catalogs full of annuals and perennials, limited in its diversity. For all the talk in the suburbs around being closer to nature, the nature in question is both ersatz and an ecological horrorshow.
“Lawns … displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term,” the Roaming Ecologist writes: “no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage.”
Lawns, by acreage, are the nation’s largest irrigated crop, surpassing corn. Lawns consume resources, including fresh water (especially in those lawns cultivated in desert climes), fertilizer, pesticides and other chemicals, fossil fuels for mowing, and a mind-numbing amount of time, on an immense scale. Much hand-wringing goes on about the use of pesticides in industrial farming and the effect it has had on the worldwide population of pollinators, but less about its destructive use in lawn care. Lawns have introduced some of the country’s most invasive species, including English ivy, Japanese and Chinese wisteria, and decorative trees such as princess tree, Bradford pear, and mimosa. Second only to deforestation, invasive species are the largest threat to the world’s biodiversity.
And all this for what?
by Kate Wagner, Curbed | Read more:
Image: Paige Vickers
