Ideal for you if: 

• You feel you have too much to mow. 

• You are frustrated by a patchy lawn (and of course all of your neighbors have beautiful, pristine, thick lawns).

• You realize that lawn is boring, and you want to add more color, more texture, more life.

• You want your property to be a serious link in the chain of usable habitat for wildlife. 

The suburban American landscape has come to rely on large expanses of lawn as neat placeholders in the landscape. The trouble is that by design, lawns are monocultures that don’t provide any ecological benefit to the environment, aside from basic erosion control. When you look out at a block full of lawns, you’re looking at a food desert for almost every member of our native food chain.

Lawns require too much attention and input from humans; we’ve been taught to fertilize, mow, overseed, aerate, and edge this most simple of landscapes… These measures are all needed because the classic American lawn is a landscape on life support. It’s never existed in the wild, so it doesn’t know how to manage itself and needs our micromanagement. 

Contrast this bleak reality with a high-functioning, low-maintenance, native landscape in place of a lawn. We’d be introducing multiple species that coevolved in our region over millenia and know how to work together and keep each other in check. These tried and true native plant communities quickly become life-giving oases for our wildlife, and they require less input from us when compared to lawns. No more regular mowing, no fertilizing, and after establishment, no watering. That’s the wonder of bringing back plants that are from this region and know how to fend for themselves!

We can work together to replace some or all of your lawn with a native garden; we can even do it in stages, too.