ANN ARBOR—The whole country seems to be afflicted. Everywhere you look, cropped green carpets sprawl across rural as well as urban and suburban landscapes. It’s lawn mania; more pronounced in America than anywhere else in the world with its roots in the early English landscape garden movements.

And Robert Grese, an associate professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE), says it has to stop. Those early versions grew easily in the English climate without supplemental watering or chemical application. And they were generally used as pasture, eliminating the need for mowing, a mania in its own right according to Grese.

“It’s relatively cheap to mow, but very expensive to the environment,” Grese says. “Emissions from lawn equipment such as weed whips, lawn mowers and leaf blowers contribute about 5 percent of the total air pollution.”

Add that costly environmental damage to the chemicals spread, sprayed or injected to keep the grass green and the “weeds” dead, and the price of what we have come to view as an aesthetic asset costs more than the dollars invested in the equipment and chemicals themselves. The chemicals are actually polluting streams, rivers and wetlands with too many nutrients helping promote an invasion of non-native plants and changes in the water’s chemical structure. The native plants are being crowded out. Native aquatic species no longer have agreeable habitat.

“Lawn care products are likely the largest group of chemicals being stored without regulation,” Grese says. “Family garages are just full of pesticides and herbicides.”

Grese proposes having just enough lawn to meet our needs. That’s not particularly the aesthetic need we have become accustomed to, but what we actually use for games or other activities. The remainder of a yard can then be planted in horticulture ground covers such as periwinkle, pachysandra, euonymus, or ivy. But even at that, Grese says, these are not compatible with native wild flowers and should not be allowed to escape. However, such plantings do not require supplemental waterings once they have become established, nor do they need regular use of herbicides and pesticides or mowing. Herbs could be used as ground covers, too?thyme and creeping herbs will do the trick. And then there’s the added benefits that come with a hillside of wild strawberries or creeping dewberries. But Grese’s own preference is for using the plants native to an area.

The challenge to the property owner, Grese says, is to discover what native plants grew locally and will grow again. In the prairie areas of the country one could consider butterfly weed, yellow coneflower, bee balm, prairie dock, asters and goldenrods, all of which provide habitat for native wildlife. No longer would we need to store and hoist heavy bags of birdseed. It would be growing in the backyard. Grese recommends finding a local arboretum or botanical garden that can help identify an area’s native plants. Some states have native plant societies that often conduct educational sessions or guided walks through local nature preserves. Conferences sponsored by arboreta or botanical gardens usually draw a mixture of homeowners, representatives from government agencies, landscapers and horticulturists, he says. And there are many books proliferating on the use of native plants in gardens. The lists found in these should be checked against local floras or other guidebooks.

“One of the stumbling blocks has often been local weed ordinances which are successfully being challenged around the country,” Grese says. “In fact, some property owners are registering their backyards as wildlife habitat with the National Wildlife Federation.”

Usually such weed ordinances require that property within a defined municipal district be mowed to resemble what we have come to know as a lawn. But the natural garden that Grese promotes resembles the prairies or natural growth of a particular geographical area of the country, be it sea oats or saguaro.

Even the federal government is making a move towards natural gardening, charging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with developing beneficial landscapes. The White House has mandated that federal agencies use native plants in landscapes surrounding their buildings or document why they are not following these directives.

Though Grese cautions that the current vogue for wildflowers has not changed the attitudes of most gardeners and designers who, he says, often use native species simply as a substitute for horticultural varieties. Instead, he says, we must work with natural plant systems and cycles, looking not only at the plants but also at the patterns and processes that can serve as the basis for landscape designs. One of those patterns is what Grese refers to as “sun openings.”

“We can use sunlight as an aesthetic tool,” Grese says. “With careful attention to the direction and angle of the sun during different times of the day as well as at different times of the year, we can make the landscape not only more interesting, but also more comfortable.”

Through classes with strong environmental focus, Grese and other faculty at SNRE are educating a new generation of landscape designers ripe for changing attitudes in managing land. In areas where people are taking an active part in restoring the land through use of native plants, they are developing a deeper sense of belonging and of ownership.

“In the 1830-1840’s,” Grese says, “horticulturist Andrew Jackson Downing depicted America as a transient people, who, through gardening and horticulture, formed an attachment to a place.”

The natural gardens Grese proposes are not instantaneous landscapes. “You just can’t pump on water and chemicals,” he says. But by waiting 15-20 years, and investing energy and time into the community and environment through establishing natural gardens and gardening practices, an attachment both to the land and the community is established.

In his work with SNRE colleague Rachel Kaplan, Grese says they have discovered that employees in some companies that have surrounded their facilities with natural gardens have reported an increased loyalty and sense of ownership to the company. Employees bring their families to enjoy the grounds on weekends. And there are sometimes other behavior changes in such employees as well. They don’t go out to lunch anymore, but bring their lunches and use that time to walk the natural areas.

“We have developed an aesthetic taste with no biological basis,” Grese says of our acute case of lawn mania. But he also cautions that establishing natural gardens is not a substitute for protecting wild areas. “This is not a ‘one-for-one’ exchange,” he explains.

U-M News and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan