Who's Your Landscape Architect?

Here’s a story that’s made national news in the last few days and for good reason: it’s about a battle that pits people who want the land in front of their houses to be ecosystems for the species that would have occurred there in nature: frogs, clover, snakes, insects, tall grasses, etc.—against the rules of their home-owner associations that call for manicured and irrigated lawns. The people under attack want nature to be their landscape architects; their assailants claim their rights to make rules that preserve their rights to certain aesthetics.

Like many of our readers here, I was born with a considerable curse: I can see both sides of the argument.

All I can say with any certainty is that we should all expect to see, as time goes on, more battles along these lines, as the planet grows smaller vis-à-vis the number of people living on it. There is also an even larger issues at stake: some people trust nature to do our gardening for us, others prefer lawnmowers, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and poorly paid undocumented workers with two-cycle engine leaf-blowers on their backs.

It was only 20 years ago that I thought these manicured lawns were pure beauty in and of themselves; I’ve more recently come to question that. Here’s part of the reason, a quote from the article: An hour of gas-powered lawn mowing produces as much pollution as four hours of driving a car. Americans use 800 million gallons of gas every year for lawn equipment, and 17 million gallons are spilled while refueling mowers — more than was leaked by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Homeowners use up to 10 times more chemicals per acre on their lawns than farmers use on crops, chemicals that can end up in drinking water and waterways.