Dear reader,
Four years ago, on the cusp of the pandemic, I moved into my current home. One of the first things I tried to do was landscape the yard. For an entire week, my wheelbarrow and I delivered barrels of soil from the alleyway to cover the lawn. It was gruelling work, and to be frank, I had no clue what I was doing, but I knew that my house looked different and didn’t fit the aesthetic of all the perfectly manicured lawns on my street, and I didn’t want to be judged by my neighbours, so I worked from sun up to sundown for over a week. My neighbours constantly stopped by to ask me questions and tell me how proud they were of the work I was doing. Little did they know, the outcome of this project by a girl with yards and yards of soil and no know-how or help didn’t turn out that well.
After spreading the soil, I seeded the lawn but opted for the Bee Turf and Alternative Lawn Wildflower Mix seeds from West Coast Seeds. These alternative mixes are intended to replace lawns in urban settings, reduce maintenance costs, increase habitat and forage for pollinators, and take less water, fertilizer, and mowing than conventional grasses. If you're going to have a lawn, these feel like the obvious ideal choice.
Then, I waited.
Eventually, the lawn grew and with it came Western yarrow, Baby blue eyes, Daisies, Chamomile, and White dutch cover. This blend of clovers and low-growing wildflowers looked lush, and, best of all, I started to see more pollinators than ever in my yard.
Photo of Bee Turf from West Coast Seeds.
But then, on numerous occasions, I noticed my neighbour—with her perfectly manicured lawn—reaching into my yard to pick out all the flowers she deemed weeds. In our society, there is this peer pressure to have a perfectly uniform green lawn, mown to an inch and a half, neatly edged. But not all of us have the time or resources to keep up with these resource-sucking lawns. I felt frustrated and decided to fuel that frustration by studying the benefits of alternative lawns.
Photo by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
THE HISTORY OF LAWNS AND WHAT THEY SYMBOLIZE
Lawns were created in the 18th century by some rich European dudes who wanted to show the people they didn’t need their land to grow crops and could do absolutely nothing with it if they wanted to. A rather juvenile game of “mine is bigger than yours,” if you ask me.
Before lawnmowers, only the rich could afford to hire the many hands needed to scythe and weed the grass, which meant that only those with the resources, skills, and materials could maintain said lands.
Looking at lawns, you can see the link between the pastoral English landscapes. They’re beautiful, peaceful, and reliably remain the same over time (because of the upkeep). Instead of using this land to grow food or as a biodiversity haven, they essentially create an ornamental ecological dead zone, which has many devastating impacts.
Forests were cut down, marshes filled in, and irrigation projects began to turn desert areas green. They even filled in swamps, changed the course of rivers, and used countless chemicals to eradicate plants they didn’t like. A few weeks ago, I wrote a poem that asked, What is it about our fascination with trying to make things live outside of their original environment? The fact is, we’re already spending so much time and money to restore things to their natural habitat (look at how the city had to daylight Hastings Creek, for example). We should really consider that history before we move forward.
With the post-WWII era came "The American Dream," and with that came suburbia and the demand for lawn culture. Picture the white picket fence and the lawn comes with it. These omnipresent lawns soon became more popular, and the homogenization of this mono-crop now symbolized the affluent middle class.
Before the war, there were very few lawns. In fact, in the book The Lawn: A History of American Obsession by Virginia Scott Jenkins, she writes about how, historically, houses were mostly built close to the street with a small fenced garden. The evolution of these suburbs was encouraged by the expansion of the railway and streetcar, along with the public park movement and the introduction of golf courses, which were also contributing factors to the expansion of the lawn. We now have an entire front lawn that is mostly left unused, and with a housing crisis and populations growing, it makes no sense to continue to sprawl in this way.
If you want to learn more about lawns, I’d highly recommend this book. It covers more topics such as golf, advertising the lawn, the democratization of the lawn, the growth of the lawn-care industry, men and women and lawns, and the war between man and nature in more depth than I can here.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
The irony of these colonized lawns is that they require a lot of maintenance and resources. As we deal with water restrictions in the summer months and watch salmon-bearing rivers run lower year after year, it is no surprise that lawns are responsible for up to a third of the city’s summer water use.
In addition, nonpoint source (NPS) pollution comes from various sources, like rainfall or snowmelt, and can move pollutants into lakes, rivers, wetlands, and even our underground drinking water tables. That means that fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide run-off as a part of lawn care can affect not only us but limit habitat potential.
Add the C02 levels from weedwhackers and lawnmowers, and we’re inviting a deluge of chemicals into our local environment. An article by Canada’s National Observer reported that gasoline-powered lawn care equipment, including mowers and leaf blowers, released more than 68,000 tons of nitrous oxides into the atmosphere in the United States in 2020. That’s equivalent to the pollution from 30 million cars.
There is also an entire history of how the chemicals from war rebranded themselves as pesticides, but I don’t have the space to divulge into that topic here, so if you’re interested, I would recommend reading The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth by Frank von Hippel.
Though these lawns seem familiar and innocuous, unintentionally introduced by humans, they are North America's single largest irrigated ‘crop,’ according to a 2005 NASA-led study.
As for the type of grass we see around here, Kentucky bluegrass is one of North America's most commonly grown and probably the one you currently see in your own yard. It was imported from Europe, and various studies, such as Kentucky Bluegrass Invasion in the Northern Great Plains and Prospective Management Approaches to Mitigate Its Spread, point to it as a cause of substantial native species losses.
These prairie grasslands are one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America, and the spread of these invasive plant species has led to approximately 70% of grasslands being lost, leaving only about 13% of the original tallgrass, 29% of mixed-grass, and 52% of shortgrass prairies according to the journal.
According to the Global Invasive Species Database, “Kentucky bluegrass has been found to disrupt ecosystem function by altering nitrogen cycling and carbon storage, lowering plant diversity and shifting seasonal forage production.”
If you want to learn more about the history of lawns and their implications, including their racist history, the USA’s fines for not mowing your lawn, and the fact that they influenced a multibillion-dollar advertising campaign, watch the video below.
ALTERNATIVES
With the economy causing grocery prices to skyrocket, a lawn turned into a garden that produces food could help feed your family and be a fun way to teach your children about food cycles and seasons. Or, if you’re interested, the Canadian Wildlife Federation is helping homeowners certify their yard as a wildlife-friendly habitat.
Another of my favourites is alternatives that mimic lawns and are adaptable to a changing climate, such as clover or chamomile groundcover, moss, and native plant meadows. Some people are even creating food gardens, wild strawberry-patched yards, and rain gardens (which are becoming more commonplace in this city and helping to negate flooding).
Let’s talk about moss. A moss lawn is incredible at retaining water. In her book Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses how “moss can lose up to 98% of its moisture and still survive to restore itself once the water supply is restored. Even after 40 years of dehydration in a musty specimen cabinet, mosses have been fully revived after a quick dunk in a Petri dish.”
That makes moss an incredible conservation option because it acts as a sponge, absorbing water and releasing it into the surrounding soil and air. Once moss is established, it’s quite easy to care for, too. I’ve placed some moss in my yard over the past few years and watched as it finds a way to establish itself through its rhizoids, which are a root-like structure anchoring it to the soil. After a rain, it’s so lush and green and reminds me of being in a forest.
Plus, moss acts as a carbon sink! A study published in Nature Geoscience says that “mosses sequester around 6.43 billion metric tons more carbon in the soil than is stored in the bare patches of soil without any plants typically found nearby them in global semi-arid areas. To put it into perspective, this is six times the annual global carbon emissions caused by changes in land use (e.g., deforestation, urbanization, mining, etc.) worldwide.”
As for clover, who didn’t like hunting for four-leaf clovers in their youth? I remember my first love and I used to lie in the grass for hours, searching for one. Eventually, we found one, and he kept it in his wallet for years. However, beyond that, clover is also an incredible alternative to grass lawns because it is drought-resistant.
This New York Times article highlights the growing trend of community members favouring a clover-filled lawn. It touches on the social pressure of having a conventional lawn, including fines, neighbours swarming houses, and even punching one another in the face. Just Google “America not mowing the lawn,” and you’ll see dozens of stories on the crazy lengths people have gone to make their neighbours mow their lawns.
Clover is great for capturing nitrogen from the air and adding it to the soil, which means, in its own way, it can act as a fertilizer. In the clover article, Ted Steinberg, a Case Western Reserve University historian and the author of ‘American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,’ talks about how though clover is a good alternative for lawns, it’s pertinent we be careful not to create another monoculture. At the end of the day, it’s about variety.
This brings me to my last example, native plant meadows.
Photo: Belkin Art Gallery
LOCAL NATIVE PLANT MEADOWS
Even my friends at the Belkin Art Gallery have worked with The University of British Columbia’s Botanical Garden Horticulture Training Program to convert their front lawn into a fireweed meadow, encouraging increased biodiversity as a metaphor for the resurgence of life after a crisis with the help of artist Holly Schmidt.
In an article in SAD Magazine titled Fireweed Fields Resilience and Resurgence After Crisis, Marcus Prasad writes, “A sprawling meadow of tall grasses engulf the front lawn of the Belkin Art Gallery, a stark contrast to the meticulously curated shrubs and low-cut lawns characteristic to the rest of UBC’s campus. Laid upon the uncontrolled growths of fireweed are boardwalks of reclaimed timber, creating labyrinthine pathways that encourage viewers to enter this wild space and immerse themselves fully in the unpredictability of the natural world.”
“When asked about this project, Holly tells me that fireweed is incredibly tenacious and has a range of uses–it’s one of the first signs of life after a major crisis like a forest fire and can be used for medicine, fibre, and shelter,” he continues.
Photo by my darling pal, Joy Gyamfi
One of my favourite local gardeners is Twitter user @notthatkhalid, whose work with plants I’ve been admiring from afar for years. While writing this story, I spoke with Khalid to see if I could share some of their important work in creating native plant meadows.
In response to a post asking, “What's your contribution to society?”
They wrote, “I’ve been restoring pollinator habitat, bringing back locally endangered species, and co-creating a native seed collective with the seeds of the things I grow.”
“Turn the golf courses into grassland habitats, pay people to get rid of their lawns, crack down on folks breaking water restrictions, teach folks how to make their watering more efficient. This water crisis will only get worse; it’s time to prepare for it,” he writes about Metro Vancouver's drought and water conservation measures.
“This is a native grass stan account. Flowers naturally get a lot of the love, but it’s the grasses that do a lot of the ecological heavy lifting,” he shares in another post.
As the semester wraps up, I await the start of April, when I plan to remove my existing lawn and replace it with more garden space, native plants, ground cover, and fruit trees. Because I covered the existing lawn last time I attempted this, I have to redo it, so know what you’re doing before you take on a project of this scale.
My yard already had plum trees, a wild cherry tree, and a fig tree, but I’m hoping to add an apple tree this year for good measure. As for the front lawn, perhaps a native plant meadow is in its future.
Until next time,
Photo of me climbing my cherry tree to pick the goods.
I recently learned that the sweet alyssum that blankets my front lawn is invasive, which I am sad about because it is so fluffy like a carpet and has a honey-like fragrance that smells like a dream.
