Lawn Reduction and Lawn Substitutes
It's a HOT topic and worthy of as many great photos and links as I can get my eager hands on. Got more? Send 'em along.
Delawning โ Theory and Practice
- The Great American Delawning Movement is my overview of the subject for a local newspaper. It includes alternatives to lawn โ meadows, serious veggie patches, woodland gardens, even installing fake turf or decking over the whole yard. Plus ways to make your lawn smaller.
- From Lawn Addiction to Anti-Lawn Activism is cribbed almost entirely from Ted Steinberg's fabulous American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn.
- Billy Goodnick makes the case for killing your lawn here . And then helpfully covers HOW to kill and dispose of the right here.
- Michael Pollan's Case Against Lawns
- A blogger in the Pacific Northwest tells us all about sheet mulching as a method of lawn removal.
Lawnless Examples in Maryland
- My Own Garden Delawning Story. A tale of two gardens with two different design challenges and alternate plant selection.
- My friend Pat Howell designed an exotic, child-friendly front garden.

- An artist's front yard is now a palette for her annual displays of grasses and HUGE sunflowers.
- This all-shrub front yard is super-low-maintenance.
- A poorly performing lawn was replaced with a front-yard woodland garden.
Lawnless Examples in California
- N. California designer Michelle Derviss shows us a terrific lawn-to-xeriscape project, very minimalist, very cool.
- Designer Susan Morrison covers lots of great options for California gardeners in this overview. Want examples? California carexes, creeping thyme, and good-old creeping juniper. Then on her own blog Susan has a whole category called "We don't need no stinking lawn" with lots of stories and potos.
- Designer Kelly Marshall makes the case for creating front-yard gardens
of California natives. - Front Lawn-to-Garden Makeover by Los Angeles garden designer and TV host Shirley Bovshow..
- Create a Neat Edible Front Yard Knot Garden is also a Shirley Bovshow contribution.
- Extreme Lawn Makeover...Low-Water Plants Take Over! is yet another Shirley Bovshow design. (Photo right.)
- The city manager in Ventura, CA goes lawnless and sets a great example. Here's the story in Sunset Magazine. (Top photo.) And also via Sunset, an 80-year-old gardener gets rid of her lawn, and wonders why she waited so long.
- Amy Stewart fell in love with the lawnless gardens of Mendocino, and we can all see why.
Lawnless Examples in Other Parts of the U.S.
- Check out these two lawnless beauties by Pennsylvania native-plant designer Larry Weaner.
- A reader near Chicago shows us her gorgeous lawnless front yard, now a cottage garden in its 8th year.
- In North Carolina, Joe Lamp'l is awfully impressed with a "wise Master Gardener" who replaced her lawn with Mondo grass. It looks great! The article is called To Mow or Not to Mow.
- Gardener Peter Schaar in Dallas shares his lawnless front AND back gardens.
- Garden writer and consultant C.L. Fornari went lawnless in her Massachusetts garden.
- I love this garden for healing in Buffalo and the Buffalo garden of Jim Chalier. Then Elizabeth discovered this private garden near Buffalo.
- Lucinda Hutson's Austin garden was a big hit with the Gardenblogger Spring Fling bunch. Pam Penick posts more (and better) photos here on her blog.
- Speaking of Austin, I've seen designer/blogger/photographer Pen Penick's front-yard garden and it's awesome. Mainly Texas natives, supplemented with other drought-tolerant beauties.
- And speaking of Chicago, how about Millenium Park?
Meadows
- The message in To Make a Meadow is that it's not so easy.
- The National Arboretum's Scott Aker on meadows (scroll down to the second Q&A).
Plants
- Eight different lawn substitutes at The Scott Arboretum in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
On a Contrary Note
- My Standard Disclaimer about Lawn Removal may shock some readers because it's a defense of turfgrass โ if it's grown organically.
- The Pro's and Con's of Faux Turf by Santa Barbara landscape archhitect Billy Goodnick.
- Comments to my article about artificial turf disabused me of my assumptions about it.
- And did you know that Ed Begley has polyethylene lawn?
- Next up is Carol of May Dreams Gardens on the subject of No-Mow Lawn which you'll be shocked to learn involves genetic rejiggering!
- In Lawn as a Low-Maintenance Solution, organic gardening expert Mike McGrath is defends the stuff.
- There's lots of info about growing lawn organically in this section.
More Great Info on Line
- Paul Tukey and the gang at SafeLawns.org are spreading the word about organic lawn care. There are videos and more on that link.
- The National Coalition for Pesticide-Free Lawns is a good resource.
Or in Print
- Food not Lawn
by Flores is making quite a splash in the "green" world. - American Green, the Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn
by Steinberg is a great read. - Organic Lawn Care
by Paul Tukey, founder of the important SafeLawns campaign. - Down to Earth Natural Lawn Care
by Raymond
