thegardenisland.com
THE GARDEN ISLAND
Friday, October 18, 2024 • B3
Get rid of your lawn without offending the neighbors Margaret Roach NEW YORK TIMES What will the neighbors think? It didn’t take long for that question to become front of mind when Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband, Evan Cooper, bought their first home, in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, in the spring of 2022. One question that answered itself right away: From the first pass with the mower over their 5,000 square feet of turfgrass, the couple knew that mowing a big lawn every week was not for them. But neither was the possibility of being seen as inconsiderate neighbors in their new community. How could they reinvent their front yard without making an unwelcome impression? This would be their first attempt at making a garden, but Sara Cooper was no stranger to the subject of lawn alternatives. She has vivid memories from childhood of a backyard with “all these fun nooks in which to play, get lost in and explore.” That yard was the work of her father, Larry Weaner, a landscape designer in Glenside, Pennsylvania, for more than 40 years and a leader in the ecological landscape design movement in the United States. Since 2019, Sara Cooper, 34, has been the executive director of New Directions in the American Landscape, an organization Weaner founded in 1990 to promote ecology-based landscape design and practice. There, she develops and coordinates educational programs, many for a professional audience. But in response to increasing inquiries from lay people, she had an idea that will come to fruition in December, when the organization kicks off a multisession online course for home gardeners called Landscaping With Nature. Taught by Weaner, it is “a condensed, simplified version of our professional intensive course,” she said, complete with its own manual. (A short segment on her DIY front-yard project will be included; she is also doing a webinar about the yard adventure on Nov. 21.) Cooper knew that most people don’t have a mentor they can text or call with questions the way she and her husband do. And right from the start there were questions — so many questions. Like that one about the neighbors. Avoiding a ‘whole brown lawn’ After some discussion with Weaner about possible designs, Cooper and her husband began visualizing a meadow in front of their house. But they knew that preparing the site by getting rid of the grass — either using herbicides or solarization under plastic to kill it, or a sod stripper to remove it completely — would create “a whole brown lawn for a while,” Cooper said. Not a delightful sight for the neighbors. Was there another tactical approach that was organic and also minimized the ugly phase, she and Evan Cooper asked Weaner? He offered a suggestion, although it wasn’t his usual practice. “He said we could try seeding and planting into the existing turf, and just try to weaken the existing turf and strengthen the native plants,” Sara Cooper said. This would be a bit of an experiment, they understood, and wasn’t the quickest means to an end. “The things that we are doing are definitely a longer process than the maybe more conventional way of killing or removing the turfgrass first, and then just seeding or planting into bare soil,” she said. As she and Evan Cooper were getting started in the fall of 2022, she took what proved to be another important preliminary step. She put out a lawn sign reading
australis) and clustered mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum). The drifts of transplants would help shorten the waiting time before there was some visual payoff, flowering sooner than seed-grown choices. After sowing, they waited and watched expectantly. And then: seedlings! “It was so fun to see the first few things coming up,” Sara Cooper said. “It wasn’t a given.” An evolving mowing regimen Once-a-year mowing, around the end of March, is now part of the care regimen for their increasingly established meadow. But along the way, the mower was called into service repeatedly in targeted maneuvers at key moments, cutting the growth to varying heights to further weaken the lawn in the evolving mix. The couple cut the grass as short as possible with their electric mower around the drifts LARRY WEANER / VIA NEW YORK TIMES where the transplants were gradually getting established. ElseEvan Cooper and Sara Weaner Cooper, who knew that weekly mowing was not for them, and where, once the seeded plants their front lawn meadow in Blue Bell, Pa. It isn’t easy or fast, but converting a grass yard into a started coming up through the native meadow can be done. turf, they needed to keep knocklower the pH of the underlying “Native Meadow in Progress” to der to thin out the grass,” she ing back the grass without besoil and bind nutrients to it, mak- said. “That allows more light to communicate to neighbors that heading the desired seedlings. what they were about to see hap- ing the elements less available to reach the soil surface where the “The first year and this past second year, we needed to do vegetation. “The turfgrass needs seeds will be, where we seeded pening was intentional, not the eventually.” that strategically timed mowing,” beginning of a pattern of neglect. fertility, and the meadow Cooper said. “I was able to adjust The sign invited questions and in- doesn’t,” Sara Cooper explained. Looking for signs of success the mower higher and higher to “So that benefits the native cluded her contact information. Seeding wouldn’t happen until just keep cutting that turfgrass, Then the couple began their ef- meadow plants.” the next January, following anbut not cut the seedlings. Once They mowed the lawn short, forts to weaken the lawn and and then had at it with a demake it more receptive to what other round of dethatching. That the seedlings got taller than the turfgrass, then obviously I was coming — to the planned first fall, they planted strategithatcher, or power rake, rented stopped mowing.” overseeding with meadow spefrom a local big-box store. “Basically placed drifts of live plants ••• — some mixed groupings and cies and to young transplants of cally, we disturbed the top layer other types. of soil and disrupted the shallow others a mass of a single species, This article originally appeared in The New York Times. First, they applied sulfur to root system of the turfgrass in or- like blue wild indigo (Baptisia