Question from Jessica:

Answer from Pat:
I too love bamboo, but before answering your question I want to add a word of caution: If you live in an area where the proximity to canyons and will vegetation enhances fire danger, my advice is don’t plant bamboo since bamboos are on the list of dangerously combustible plants. I also must add that most bamboos do better and look better with ample water. Mexican weeping bamboo (Otatea acuminate aztecorum) is perhaps the most drought-resistant bamboo I can think of. If you fail to water it at all it won’t die, but even this will look much better if well watered. Also it dies every 35 years and since that cycle began about ten years ago as I recall, you will only have it for about 25 years before it begins flowering, dying and looking ratty. (Bamboos are all monocarpic plants, which means they bloom but once and then die. Most species all bloom at one time hence the belief that they are all one plant or clones of one ancient plant.) I love Otatea due for its graceful appearance, despite its short lifetime, but it won’t serve your purpose since it makes a pretty huge clump. Some nurseries are selling this for hedges, so don’t be misled.

Your best option is to choose a better hedge-type of bamboo (a clumping bamboo that stays at the appropriate height and width) and the one I recommend is golden bamboo (Phyllostaches aurea) which grows to 6 or 10 feet tall. This one can take a lot of drought and is good for your climate zone, but it will look better if you water it. It’s widely available and often sold for hedges. I think you will be very happy with it. Fertilize it once a year in March with organic lawn food. Bamboo, after all is giant grass.

No related posts.

Question from Karen:

Answer from Pat:
Common yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is the species most often used as a lawn substitute. One can purchase seed in bulk from several catalogues, including Peaceful Valley Farm Supply.(://www.groworganic.com/seeds.html) On their new website called “GrowOrganic.com”, you’ll find it listed under “Flowers” , “Yarrow, White”.

Thank you so much for the good things you have said about it, since I have long been promoting it as a drought-resistant lawn substitute. It makes an excellent lawn once established and it creeps and spreads by underground runners. One needs to edge it so it doesn’t invade flower beds. The common kind of yarrow has white flowers but colorful varieties of A. millefolium have been developed including ‘Gold Plate’ and ‘Coronation Gold’ that have flowers 3 feet tall. There are also seed pack varieties with many colors of flowers. One is called ‘Pastel Carpet’ and the flowers of this one are not too tall. The fact you speak of the flowers as being “low” and “tiny” makes me wonder if you have one of these varieties. The ferny foliage of A. millefolium is green.

At my house I am mixing in other types of yarrow just for the fun of it and to enjoy the colors of flowers other than white. Some of these have gray foliage and you can find many colors of flowers from pink to gold. Woolley yarrow (Achillea tomentosa) for example has gray foliage and makes a thick mat which then creeps. I have found several colors of this species in small 4-inch pots and they have done very well for me and are now creeping.

Achillea x taygetea is native to the Eastern end of the Mediterranean sea and has several shades of yellow flowers that look good together. I have not yet found any of this one. Flowers grow one and a half feet tall. These are nice for cut flowers. There’s also Greek yarrow (A. serbica) native to the Balkans. This has silvery gray foliage and makes a mat with short-stemmed white flowers.

My own yarrow-covered “lawn” is fairly small so I clip off the flowers at ground level after they fade, but usually I recommend folks use a weed-wacker to remove flowers after bloom. You can also use a weed-wacker to give the lawn a haircut once a year if you want. I also plant some wildflowers in my yarrow lawn and pull them out when they fade.

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1. Drought-resistant Lawn Substitute for People and Dogs
2. Variegated Carmel creeper (Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Diamond Heights’ as lawn substitute
3. Native Perennials Suitable For Planting Near A Coastal Lagoon

Question from Courtney:

Answer from Pat:
I have seen healthy trees growing extremely well with artificial grass installed right up to their trunks. I have even been impressed by how good looking these landscapes were and have seen flower beds flourishing next to them so that the lawn looked real. It is not necessary to create a circle of organic mulch or real grass to surround the trunk of your tree since the artificial lawn can come right up to the trunk.

There are only two problems to consider—and you should ask your artificial grass company about these subjects prior to planting your tree—one is watering and the other fertilizing. You will need to water your tree right through the artificial lawn or arrange for irrigation beneath it, and you don’t want this action to stain the grass. Also, you need to know how much water to apply to the roots of the tree and make sure it penetrates the ground sufficiently and does not puddle. In the cases I have seen the ground was sometimes mounded close to the trunk so the trunk was not in a dip. Secondly, in order to feed the tree you will need to be able to spread any necessary fertilizer on top of the artificial grass and water it through the grass down into the ground to reach the roots of the tree. So ask the grass company about these two requirements.

In some cases artificial grass surrounding a tree is actually better for the tree than real grass. The warmth provided by artificial grass can speed the growth of tropical and subtropical trees. Also, unlike living grass which grabs much of the nitrogen in the soil before it reaches the tree’s roots, artificial grass takes nothing from the soil. It simply acts as a type of plastic mulch on top of the ground, keeping down weeds, holding in moisture and increasing warmth. (Plastic mulches of various kinds are often used in agriculture and home gardening.) By contrast, trees planted into existing lawns often take a long time to get growing because they must compete with the hungry roots of the lawn.

It may astound some people that a devoted organic gardener would suggest that artificial grass could have any advantages at all, but I am not a purist. I believe that artificial grass is useful in certain situations. You have described one good example and here is another: Side yards are often difficult to landscape since the hot sun can alternate with too much shade. In such a situation artificial grass can provide a ground cover that looks good year-round, takes no upkeep, and saves untold amounts of precious irrigation water. A few vines and colorful potted plants can complete the look. One can even cover the entire area with a shade structure.

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Question from Ann:

I also have a question regarding Tecoma Gold Star and Orange Jubilee. would they become invasive in our area and would Jubilee be a better choice as I’ve read it fewer seed pods?

Answer from Pat:
Variegated Carmel creeper (Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Diamond Heights) is a uniquely colorful and somewhat newer selection among the low-growing ground-cover types of California lilac (Ceanothus). I have seen it growing on sunny banks. In spring the small light blue flowers are effective against the variegated chartreuse and dark green foliage. It is drought resistant once established and usually does well in full sun along the coast, part shade inland but it requires excellent drainage. A bank is an ideal location for this plant, but I see no reason why it should not survive on flat ground as long as the drainage is good. If I were you I would go ahead and try it if you can provide sharp drainage. If drainage is not good, think again.

Tecoma stans ‘Gold Star’ is a tropical plant that does have seeds but I have not noticed it being invasive in coastal California though it may be in Texas where it is far more frequently grown. One really should cut off the seed capsules anyway to keep it blooming and sheer the plant once a year after the first wave of bloom. I wouldn’t worry too much about the invasive factor. Tecoma stans x ‘Orange Jubilee’ has fewer seed capsules so you don’t have to cut them off but the main difference between these plants is color and size. So consider color and size when you choose between them. ‘Gold Star’ grows to be about 3 to 6 feet tall in the US and has abundant yellow blossoms during the warm months. ‘Orange Jubilee’ grows to approximately 8 feet wide and 12 feet tall so it makes a fine screen plant and it has orange blossoms. It is a dense shrub and though not invasive from seeds it spreads from suckers coming up from the ground. You can cut it to the ground and it will come back. It needs a hot spot. Won’t do well in cold wind.

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Question from Jon:

Any info or advice you could provide would be appreciated.

Again, looking forward to your April talk at Master Gardener seminar.

Thanks a bunch!!

Answer from Pat:
I agree this grass looks very nice, except I would cut back the dead stuff and shear off the flowers annually in fall. I am not sure what it is though it appears to be some kind of carex which may be native. If so, I can guarantee it will seed itself though it might not be a huge problem. (I have Carex pansa, a native evergreen grass, in my garden, it does spread from seeds but is not too much of a nuisance, since i am able to transplant the clumps that volunteer into an area where they are useful.

If this is ordinary fountain grass (Pennisetum setaceum), an African plant, it will be an awful problem and this has been a badly invasive plant on road edges where it was planted by Caltrans. Red fountain grass does not make seeds but the green variety is hugely invasive as is Mexican fountain grass. One of those plants has even sprung up in my garden though it’s not growing in any other garden within a quarter of a mile.

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3. A Lawn with Weeds and Mowing Lawns Without a Catcher

How do I handle the de-thatching of a common Bermuda lawn. My gardener 40 or fifty years ago used to dethatch every year. I even used to mow down almost to soil level occasionally with my good reel mower (which is now long gone). Gardener’s son has taken over the business, uses rotary mowers, aerates once a year if I remind him. Back lawn seems to respond well to feeding and watering but front lawn doesn’t, Too many huge trees–juniper, aleppo pine, and New Zealand. I love the trees but am beginning to hate the grass, It is probably too late to dethatch or power rake this year–just wondered if you think that might help in the spring.

I was so impressed with your response to my question about pruning my New Zealand Christmas Tree. I have an arborist due to come next week as you suggested. Both my sons asked me to e-mail them copies of your pruning suggestions. Thanks again.

Answer from Pat:
How to DeThatch a Bermuda Lawn was the subject of a television show I did many years ago in the mid-eighties and I won the Emmy for that show and some others on “How To Build a Structure to Keep Critters from Tomatoes”.

All my month-by-month books contain the step-by-step method for de-thatchin lawns that I researched way back then and showed on TV. I trust you have my book, (the current edition is called “Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening, Month-by-Month.”) If you look on page 104 of that book you will find detailed instructions for De-thatching Warm-Season Lawns. (which includes Bermuda.) If you don’t have it, please go to your local bookstore—book stores sometimes run out but if so they can order it for you—or order from me or from Amazon. On the Page 105 are instructions for “How to Level Your Lawn”, which was another TV Show I did and a good thing to do after thatching.

These instructions are quite long and contain much detail,—In addition to scalping it right down with a reel mower like you did, I believe in renting a de-thatching machine, for example— too much to include here, but just briefly the job must be done in late winter just before the lawn begins to wake up and grow again so the lawn can bounce back quickly. And also after de-thatching sometimes one needs to level at that time so there aren’t bumps in the lawn which have probably occurred on your lawn due to the trees. Late winter, or early spring, February after the weather has warmed up mid-month is the best time. (De-thatch cool season-lawns in fall. Instructions for de-thatching cool-season lawns are included in my book in the chapter for September.) Lawn care is in every chapter as is care for annual and perennial flowers, roses, and vegetables. Other subjects are covered as they arise around the year.

As far as your problem with shade goes, the best lawn grass for shade is St. Augustine. New varieties of St. Augustine have finer blades than the old variety. Unfortunately it takes more water than Bermuda though not as much in shade as it does in sun. A friend of mine has it under trees and it has never been a problem for her. She has a big Easter egg hunt every year on her lawn. But yes, definitely I would de-thatch your bermuda in spring and sometimes after that it begins to look a lot better. Give it a try! And by the way, why not switch to mulch under the trees?

Thanks for your kind comments on what I wrote you about the New Zealand Christmas tree. You are very welcome. I put your thank-you at the bottom of your letter to make this a new topic under a new heading that will help people with de-thatching lawns. You know how it is done but other folks might not. (Thanks for bringing up the subject!)

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Answer from Pat:
Yes I think I can help you.

First to cheer you up about your problem with the mowing of the nearby golf course. Using a mulching mower, such as you describe on a lawn, but especially on golf courses is good for the grass and good for the environment, so I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you. All lawns should be mown with mulching mowers, or at least they should be mown without a catcher whenever possible and practical so that the grass blades fall back onto the lawn. If a person lives in a damp climate and a lawn makes a lot of clippings that fail to dry, I can understand a gardener catching them, but a conscientious gardener would is collecting grass clippings will then compost the grass and never send it to the dump. The drum type of composter makes this task easy. By using grass clippings as nitrogenous waste and bagged wood chips such as pellets made for rabbit litter as the carbonaceous waste, the composting process is easy and productive.

When grass blades are allowed to fall back onto the lawn at first the blades of grass dry on top of the lawn. Then they sift down to the ground and the benefits to the lawn are several. Grass clippings are almost purely nitrogenous waste, so just as they will heat up a compost pile so also will they fertilize a lawn. Using grass blades to provide part of the fertilizer needed by a golf course or a lawn is highly beneficial for all of us, since it saves our ground water from being filled up with salts from synthetic fertilizers, or even from salts from faster-acting or salty types of organic fertilizers like manures, that have been used to feed the lawn and washed down into the ground. A lawn provided with its own clippings will also be growing in a more organic and biologically active soil and this will keep it freer from disease so the golf course won’t need to be using chemicals to cure disease problems.

Now about weeds. A thick, healthy, organically-fertilized and cared for lawn can usually fight off weeds. Especially the old tall marathon fescue grasses such as you have, when well-grown and properly tended were able to force out weeds. Most golf courses are well managed and do not have a lot of weeds and thus do not spread weed seeds, but weeds are everywhere and they are spread by birds. The seeds can come from around the golf course and not the grass itself and they can also blow in on the wind. But there is one glaring exception to what I have said about golf courses. If the golf course is Bermuda grass there is no chance of you or anyone else in your neighborhood of having any other kind of grass other than Bermuda grass. If you live that close Bermuda grass is going to seed itself into your lawn and that is what you will end up with so you might as well start out with it. It really isn’t the fault of the golf course but around the edges and in the rough there are bound to be seeds of bermuda and it is an invasive grass spread by seeds. My suggestion is that you install a concrete edging around the lawn, choose a fine hybrid Bermuda grass, and switch to a Bermuda lawn planted by sod. Tell the company that sells it to you that you want a very thick hybrid of a variety that stays green longest in winter and crowds out weeds. Also I recommend that you fertilize it organically to keep it healthy. Gardeners who have switched to the organic way are amazed at how thick their lawn has grown and how much better it looks. ‘Santa Ana’ hybrid is a good home lawn and grows thickly. Get it thatched every few years and it will look good most of the year. The great thing about Bermuda is that it is so drought-resistant and tolerant of heat. Zoysia grass also prevents weed invasion and a variety called ‘Verde’ stays green longer. It has a very fine texture and makes an elegant lawn. I know folks in Rancho Santa Fe who have and love it. It is drought-resistant and NO WEEDS! It looks like velvet in summer and goes brown briefly in winter. They say they don’t mind.

The lawngrass you said described as coarse and uncomfortable to sit on, must be St. Augustine. It is heat and shade resistant and newer types have finer blades than older types. You could probably find a St. Augustine variety today that would please you, despite the fact that you are afraid you won’t like it, and you wouldn’t even know it was St. Augustine. But you would need to talk to the sod company and make sure it would be equally resistant to weeds as the old type. The reason that I don’t generally recommend St. Augustine is that it is not drought-resistant. It needs a lot of water and fertilizer to look good. If the lawn is shady it’s the only thing to grow, however. If you decide to change lawns be sure to plant from sod. Don’t plant the new lawn with seeds. Whatever lawn you decide to plant, once planted, fertilize it at intervals with an organic preemergent weed killer such as corn gluten meal used according to package directions.

One final word, you never told me what kind of weeds your lawn is suffering from. If the lawn has nutgrass your problem is greater than if you have other weeds. Nutgrass doesn’t come from the golf course but is usually in a potted plant or transplant or some top soil and that’s how it gets into gardens. Or a bird could drop a seed. In lawns there is a chemical treatment for nutgrass and it does not kill the grass. But I don’t advocate using it since I believe in the organic way. Organic controls for nutgrass, or nutsedge as it is more properly called, are on page 104 in my current organic book. However, the year 2000 edition of my book contains a detailed discussion of the chemical method and you can still purchase used copies of that book on the internet.

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Even in those days lawns were an anachronism in the dry West, but I had a good reason for wanting one. Years later, during the 1970’s when portions of the lawn succumbed to shade, water was more expensive, and our daughters had grown up, Frances Wright suggested I dig out the lawn and replace with a brick patio. This sounded like a good idea so I hired the job done, but the first morning when I woke up and looked out of our bedroom window at brick instead of grass, the sparse look shocked me to the core. “What have I done?” I said to Lou, “I’ve banished nature!” Eventually I realized a lawn was not a necessary component of a natural garden, but at that moment I was sure it was. Barrels, pots, and hanging baskets were the best solution I could find. I filled them to overflowing with colorful plants and watered everything with the hose. Containers gave me the look of a garden, but they didn’t save any time or water. Then in the 1980’s while demonstrating drip irrigation on TV, I hooked up drip lines and a timer and automated all the irrigation. Here was a way to save time as well as water and grow a garden too. After that, I never looked back.

Since my childhood in England, lawns had been part of my life. Now I was weaned from them and looked at all garden plants and the wild landscape, too, with new eyes. Far from banishing nature, perhaps I’d become a true westerner and had begun to love what grew well here instead of yearning for something that didn’t belong. In the west all garden styles are permissible, and unless we grow native plants exclusively, all styles require some irrigation, but there are ways to achieve a wide variety of effects without resorting to profligate waste. Even lawn grasses offer us choices, including the drought-resistant grasses, Bermuda grass and zoysia, that will pull in their horns and go through drought without dying. Shortly after I got rid of the lawn we had our first serious drought. People became more aware of the need for water conservation. Nonetheless, water-guzzling cool-season lawns were still a major feature of most home gardens and commercial landscapes, but no longer of mine.

Lou and I moved to Del Mar in 1955. We built our home here because his mother, Frances Wright, and her husband John Lloyd Wright lived here. John Lloyd Wright was the second son of Frank Lloyd Wright, and John had followed in his father’s footsteps and also became an architect. The Wrights owed Lou a legal fee, and in lieu of payment they gave us the large lot next door to their house on the west but further down the hill. They included the architectural fee, so we could build our home. During the first 5 years of our marriage in the early 1950’s, Lou and I rented houses in and around Los Angeles, one hundred miles north of here. Los Angeles was a city of small homes, and those in West Los Angeles where we first settled had beautiful gardens. Most of them had large front and back lawns.

When I first came to Hollywood in 1944, one of the first sounds I associated with waking up in the morning was the clickity-click-whoosh, clickity-click-whoosh of overhead sprinklers watering lawns and gardens. People poured water on the ground as if there were an endless supply. Back in Bucks County, Pennsylvania my family had relied on rainfall to keep the lawns surrounding our stone farmhouse alive, and sometimes they went a bit dry. But in California where water had traveled for hundreds of miles by aqueduct, lawns were wet and squishy underfoot. There was something empty and slightly sad about all these abundant gardens with their over-irrigated lawns. Los Angeles didn’t feel real, it was just another Hollywood set. Many people came to California from the east coast or the Middle West, and they brought their gardening styles along with them. Homeowners of the 1940’s and 50’s vied with each other to have the best lawn on the block. Few people realized that a broad expanse of lawn wasn’t fitting in the arid West. Even fewer knew the history of lawns in America or why so many Americans even to this day take such incredible pride in them. Today the whole subject of lawns deserves a second look, but a century ago America’s love affair with lawns revolutionized the appearance of suburban America and brought about a huge improvement in American life.

The great lawn mania began in the 19th century as an effort to clean up small-town New England. In her well-researched book, “The Lawn, A History of an American Obsession”, Virginia Scott Jenkins chronicles the entire story and questions today’s aesthetic of the ubiquitous front lawn and all it means to us in time, water, and chemicals. But a glance at what American towns must have looked like before the advent of the lawn is enough to make one conclude that whatever faults lawns may now have, when first introduced they were a huge improvement over what was there before. Many small towns and villages in colonial New England consisted of two wide rows of houses, arranged on either side of a road, along with a white clapboard church, a meeting house, a general store, a school, a tavern, and a common. Behind each house stood a barn, an outhouse, a chicken coop, odd pieces of farm machinery, and often an open-fronted carriage house sheltering a wagon, a carriage, and a horse-drawn sleigh. In prosperous New England, only the poorest people lacked these accoutrements. When I was a child, many of the barns and carriage-houses were still standing. When my brother and I immigrated to the United States in 1939, it was only 30 years or so since the horse had been a major means of travel. Our Dad, Emerson Fisher-Smith, brought John and me and our little half-brother Bill to America to escape the coming war and to join our mother, Ruth, and her second husband Geoffrey Morris, who had rented a house for the family in Huntington, Long Island. Our house had one of those old, open-fronted carriage houses still standing next to it. We used it as a garage for the family Buick and for storing firewood. I used to climb onto its rakishly sloping roof to read the American books my schoolteacher suggested to me.

One’s vision of America in the Victorian era, influenced by old movies, might be that of lovely Colonial buildings surrounded by green lawns, but the truth is grass didn’t grow as well in America as it did in England. When the settlers first came to America they found to their dismay that native grasses weren’t nutritious enough to keep European cattle alive. They imported pasture grass, but lawn grass in any quantity wasn’t brought to America until much later. European weeds imported accidentally grew better and spread more rapidly than grass. In England the common in each village was meant as a community grazing ground for domestic animals, but in America, since there was little if any grass, townspeople used the commons as dumping grounds and they soon became scruffy, messy places, criss-crossed by pot-holed wagon trails, edged by piles of trash. Weeds proliferated, and pasture grass sprang up here and there while domestic animals including cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens wandered about freely throughout most towns, grazing on grass or weeds wherever they found them. People commonly threw garbage out of their back doors to feed the pigs, notorious rooters that can tear up a patch of green grass and turn it into a mud wallow in no time flat. Some homeowners fenced the front of their property to keep animals away from their front doors, but front yards were little more than bare ground and weeds with possibly a few hollyhocks or other more straggly flowers kept alive in dry weather by buckets of water from the well.

In the 19th century a horse and carriage or cart performed the same service as a family automobile or truck does today. Hay was the fuel that kept horses running, but what emerged from the other end it was a lot more difficult to ignore than exhaust from a car. It took huge quantities of hay to keep animals alive especially in winter. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to realize what the road and most of the ground around the house must have been like in hot weather when dust and insects became a problem, or in rain or snow. I once drove by an isolated farm in the Grand Massif of rural France that had a mountain of manure in its stone-walled barnyard almost as high as the barn. One poor farmer had simply gotten overwhelmed. Some New England towns had sidewalks of planks and later slabs of stone, so women in their long dresses and business men in good clothes could walk about without getting covered with dust, mud, and manure. Some households were neater than others, but if you could have gone up in a balloon above a small town in America at the beginning of the 19th century you would have seen buildings surrounded by mud, weeds, bare earth, and trash.

In the midst of this sorry state of affairs arose the great idea, let’s clean things up! The movement began when well-to-do Americans traveled to Europe on the Grand Tour and came home extolling the English landscape garden. Above all they had admired the smooth, emerald-green lawns, perhaps not fully realizing that in England a cool, rainy climate combined with centuries of mowing and rolling had conspired to produce grassy perfection. In some cases incredibly smooth lawns appeared to stretch to the horizon where polite English cows, sheep, and deer, unlike unruly American ones, were apparently content to munch grass and ornament the view without so much as dreaming of invading the garden. This peaceful scene was made possible by a clever 18th century invention called the ha-ha. A ha-ha is a grassy ditch one side of which slopes gently up into a pasture and the other side of which is a vertical retaining wall stopping at ground level. Ha-ha’s keep deer and domestic animals out of gardens in a similar manner that moats in zoos keep wild animals inside enclosures. One can stand in a garden or on a lawn and look straight over the ha-ha without realizing it is there. Many an unsuspecting person has fallen off into space, hence the name. They are still building ha-ha’s in England, and several were built in the United States by Thomas Jefferson and other wealthy men, to keep deer and cattle out of their gardens. Last summer I took a photograph of a ha-ha at Bolton Abbey in the Yorkshire Dales with a young cow staring at it as if to say “What a nuisance I can’t climb over that!” This ha-ha had been built since I last visited Bolton Abbey in 1971. In those days, there were no crowds of visitors swimming in the River Wharf or picnicking on its banks, and inside the grassy nave of the ruined abbey, cows had wandered around in bucolic splendor.

The people of post-Civil War New England, hungry for entertainment, were as addicted to attending lectures as people are today to flicking on the TV. In the 1860’s and 70’s lectures proselytizing the cleaning up of villages by planting grass became the rage. Preachers climbed into their pulpits, citizens formed women’s clubs and garden clubs and magazines extolled gardening as a healthy pursuit. Orators exhorted townspeople to cover all bare ground with grass and plant avenues of elms. By doing this, they claimed, the entire village could be transformed into a pleasant landscape, like an English landscape garden, that all could enjoy. The enthusiasm took hold and spread. Townships passed laws mandating the fencing of pigs, cows, and sheep. Townspeople spread fresh gravel on roads, cleaned up trash and manure, collected unused farm equipment into museums, and created local dumps distanced from town. But the grassy paradise envisaged by reformers couldn’t completely come about until the development of better ways to mow grass than sheep and scythes. Even in England, lawns weren’t widely popularized until after 1830 when the lawn mower was invented. Various sizes of mowers were imported into America and sold to the wealthy, but it wasn’t until the late 19th century when lightweight, reasonably inexpensive, hand-pushed lawn mowers were manufactured in the United States that growing a lawn became practical for people of modest means.

During the 1890’s new companies sprang up to import and develop lawn seeds that would grow in America. The development of city water systems, rubber hoses, and sprinklers made it easier to maintain a lawn and a garden through summer heat. Women and later men began to take up gardening by the droves. They planted lilac, orange daylilies, dogwoods, and forsythia. Daffodils and tulips became the rage. But the most dramatic difference took place when people seeded lawn grass around their houses right down to the edge of the road. European travelers noticed that America’s democratic spirit expressed itself through the fact that instead if having walls and fences around their gardens, the front lawns of small towns everywhere ran together like one enormous communal park. Children played together with no thought of boundaries, citizens of all classes greeted each other in a friendly way as they walked about through the village, and in the evenings families sat on their front porches, chatting, knitting, and watching the children play. Only the elderly folks realized that just a few years earlier the whole village had been a sea of bare earth and mud, and that the planting of lawns had brought all this about. By the turn of the 19th century, the habit of planting front lawns had spread from town to town, up and down the east coast, and throughout the Middle West. It took another fifty years for the typical suburban look to spread coast to coast throughout the United States, and for the accepted ideal to be that every house in every block should have a front lawn with the street shaded by an avenue of trees, preferably all of the same species or variety.

The democratic style of the American garden persists to this day, and there are still many good reasons for having a lawn. If one has children and dogs, a lawn may still provide the cleanest ground cover on which they can play. One can’t play games such as croquet, lawn bowls, or badminton on anything else except a clay court or artificial grass, and few gardeners are happy with these alternatives. Lawns help cool houses and provide a pleasing green that’s restful to the spirit. But on the other hand, especially in the West many gardeners feel that if a lawn is used merely as a convenient way to cover space, one can find better alternatives.

Young children find joy in gardens with or without a lawn. My great-granddaughter, Fable, loves visiting the Hamilton Children's Garden in Encinitas, which does not need a lawn to be fun for kids. (San Diego Botanic Garden, formerly Quail Gardens.)

A century ago the front lawn revolutionized the look of America, but it did so during an era when planting lawn grass was the only known way to cover bare earth with clean plant material. Today thousands of new plants have been introduced and studied, and new styles of gardening have emerged. When combined with other plants, even a small amount of green ground cover can lend the peaceful atmosphere of a lawn. Across from my front door, is a raised bed with a formal planting of ferns, liriope, and mondo grass. I recently planted two flats of Irish moss in the front portion of this area to replace some ferns that had been there before. In the same way that bonsai trees satisfy our desire to be around an ancient forest, this ‘mini lawn” satisfies our psychological yearning for the green grass that the history of lawns in England and America has influenced us to expect.

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