It’s a very minor “solution”, but you might encourage your city to bring in a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers. As well as being noisy, they generate outsized volumes of GHGs and air pollution. Quite a few California cities are requiring that landscapers switch to electrically powered tools. Enforcement seems minimal so far, but it’s a (very small) start.
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I think we need a “no-mow all the time” instead of a “no-mow May”.
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oh i’m with you there. i’m ok with small lawn areas that are actually getting used, but lawn in general is absolutely ridiculous. any time i live somewhere i have any say over the land i start ripping out lawn :D
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The leafblowers are a particular bugbear of mine. I don’t see how it’s socially acceptable to cause that kind of racket - if I played music at that volume, someone would phone in a noise complaint!
If you don’t want leaves on your lawn, or in your parking space, go and rake them up like a responsible member of society. Don’t deafen innocent neighbours. Especially as more of us are working from home now, and don’t have a choice about sitting in our rooms listening to you ‘gardening’.
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This hits home. My childhood home/mom’s house has a big open field behind it, which I loved as a kid and now her grandkids love it. Once I moved away though, I realized a big open field is a luxury. California (southern, too, like previously mentioned) felt very manufactured in every way, including the environment. I live in a nice place now that I love but I do not love the HOA and the enforced and expected landscaping at all. I actually broke the rules and got fined for breaking the rules but then they stopped caring after they got their lunch money for it. So stupid. They don’t even care. Buncha silly junk, imo. Like, I didn’t want to waste a ton of money caring for an ugly grass lawn that requires treatment, why should I? Why should anybody? And I typically like rules. But stupid rules are stupid rules and they’re stupid.
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I would say that electric leaf blower models tend to be quieter even than someone using a hand-held rake. If using an electric blower makes the process more efficient than a rake, I’m not going to object.
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I hate leaf blowers so much. I have really bad allergies and being near one just about kills me. Where I work, the various businesses all use landscaping companies so it never fails that there’s a leaf blower going pretty much every day in the summer/fall and even right now in the spring when there is nothing to blow. I also hate that lawns are the norm here in Colorado where we don’t have enough water for them.
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I basically only use my (batgtery powered) leaf blower for two things - blowing grass from my driveway and back into my yard, and blowing all the leaves into the flowerbeds at the end of the season. Other than that, it seems pointless, and I’ll never understand how a few of my neighbors can spend HOURS using the darn things on their tiny yards. One guy will be out at 9am with the dang thing.
At least from To Mow or Not to Mow a YouTube video by The History Guy, I got the impression that it’s part of keeping up with the Joneses, emulating wealthy people, etc. since and idle, manicured lawn with minimal trees shows ownership of land that’s not doing anything productive.
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Oh man, this so much this.
Has anyone else watched last week’s Last Week Tonight? the main segment is on HOAs in America and frankly it would probably do a great job elucidating WHY some places feel so artificial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os
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I have defended lawns on here before. They can be of high wildlife value depending on what part of the world you are in and how you manage them. My lawn (North Wales, UK) is about 6 metres by 8 metres and takes up about a third of my garden. It gets mown about 5 times a year (1948 push mower, nothing motorised) and over the 26 years I have lived here it has got richer and richer in flowers, culminating in an orchid about 7 years ago. Mowing is the only management it gets. There is usually plenty of rain here, and if there is a drought, it goes brown but soon recovers when the rain comes. And the compost heap that the mowings go on has produced some good invertebrate records over the years too. My lawn isn’t old enough for waxcaps yet, but some of the best waxcap (Hygrocybe fungi) sites are old lawns, e.g. the one at Darwin’s house.
On the other hand, the manicured, herbicided, vermicided lawns that get watered every weekend are abominations. But there is something worse that is becoming popular in Britain: plastic lawns.
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Would that not count more as a developing wildflower meadow, rather than a managed lawn? Roughly how much biomass, or area, would be monoculture turf grass?
My three gardens have never had a lawn - but plenty of runners from before or next door
I have read about polyculture lawn since this in 2010
Nebraska
And East London
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The good news is “not everybody is an idiot”. The Rockford Park District in Rockford Illinois, has come to the realization that it costs a lot of money to mow all the grass in the city parks. They are replacing some of the mowed grass with native prairie plants and trees. They are also trying to preserve habit for endangered species, such as the Rusty Patch Bumble Bee, and remove invasive plant species; such as amur honeysuckle. The RPD conservation supervisor is a member of iNaturalist.
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We are “bombed” day by day by institutions with claims on the necessity of sustainability and the need to reduce the use of fossil resources but, at the same time, all these activities you mentioned necessarily need fossil imputs. What a contradiction!
On the other hand, minimally managed urban green spaces are well known to need very few energy imputs but those from the sun.
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Given that a meadow is a grassland managed by mowing, you could argue that a lawn is a special form of meadow. But a typical meadow is allowed to grow for a few months and then cut for hay when the grass is flowering. Ecologically I’d say a lawn is closer to a pasture, since the grass is kept at the kind of height you would expect under permanent grazing. The suite of flowers is different from a meadow. The lawn flowers are mainly low-growing repeat flowerers such as daisies, self-heal and trefoils. The orchid gets special treatment to let it flower. You don’t generally get waxcaps in meadows.
As for how much of it is monoculture grass, that depends on how you sample it. A 10 cm quadrat would be unlikely to find any monoculture grass but at the 1 square centimetre scale you would be quite likely to find only grass (and moss).
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This is a great topic. I just moved from a more “working class” neighborhood to a more “upscale” (as measured by the houses and cars people drive) neighborhood. The first thing I noticed is how they are front yard lawn snobs. Almost no one cuts their own lawn, they all use lawn services with very loud two-cycle engine driven mowers, trimmers and blowers. When we were in the summer of the fourth year of drought every morning and often during the heat of summer days the gutters were flowing with water from the lawn sprinklers. Burr clovers infested my lawn but our neighbor offered that their lawn guys could spray it with something that would kill them - I looked at them askance and told them that I preferred to have insects and clover as opposed to a beautiful lawn. During the heat of the summer another neighbor had their lawn removed and replaced with a high water required grass. Other neighbors have green plastic grass lawns both in their front yard and back yard. I must say, I do not understand this mentality.
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The type of lawn you’re defending is not the type that environmentalists are questioning, if all lawns were biodiverse like yours there would be no controversy to begin with.
The average lawn is just one grass species + a few dandelions and invasive weeds.
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yeah, the biodiversity of lawns can really vary a lot. yours looks really nice and my lawn at my past place was similar with tons of wildflowers and when one got big i’d mow around it until it went to seed. Just mowing higher and less often helps, plus, why the heck do people pull non-grass species out of lawns (aside from invasive or painful ones like caltrop vine)? dandelions for instance. They are cute, they don’t require any care, bees like them, etc, why pull them from a lawn? I find it really weird even if you do want a lawn for whatever reason.
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Once upon a time I wrote a weekly column called The Ecophile for my local daily newspaper. My subject, one week, was why lawns are cultural artifacts of a bygone era that waste water, pollute rivers, encourage an anti-ecological mindset and are, as you note, generally, absolutely ridiculous. The response was more or less favourable for the most part but the agribusiness and landscaping types associated with the agricultural college associated with the local University jumped on me hard. This was forty or so years ago.
I’d be interested in seeing some stats on whether what you’re seeing is a general phenomenon or something particular to a place or class. I know that there aren’t as many older landscape trees as 25 years ago in the area where I live because of a series of ice storms, tornados and whatnot since tha late 90s. It’s amazing what 4 days of freezIng rain can do to alter a landscape. But the communities I’ve lived in over the last 40 years are all much smarter about these sorts of things now than previously. There will always be nincompoops and progress never happens in a straight line at a constant rate.
The mulch stuff is a basically an example of a good idea being hijacked by profiteers. It’s been rebranded from a means of managing soil conditions to yet another ill-advised aesthetic obsession.
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Some American cities are financially rewarding residents who change their garden. To capture rain, with porous paving or planting, or changing lawn to something water-wise.
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