KILL YOUR LAWN

It’s not just about how the lawn looks - bland and boring as hell. It’s about the ideology that the lawn represents - fear, unthinking conformity, obedience, a deranged and unhealthy relationship with land itself.

Lawns represent a fundamental disconnection from nature. Lawns represent the silly idea that humans are somehow separate and apart from - and even better than - the rest of the biosphere.

Lawns represent the fundamental ignorance and “denial of place” that’s been ingrained in all of us from a young age. With the biosphere collapse around us as modern human civilization turns the landscape into a smoldering ashtray of lackluster values, we can no longer afford to be ignorant.

The idea that so many of us grow up having no idea what the native plant species were that inhabited the land that we now live before we built our cities there is tragic.

Killing the lawn is only the first step. Replacing it with something better, more filling, more alive and diverse is the actual end game. What does it feel like to be able to restore the habitat that was lost? What does it feel like to get to know the cast of native plant species that once lived on the land you now occupy for millions of years? It doesn’t have to all be done at once - take it easy, one step at a time. As you plant native perennials, bunchgrasses, shrubs, trees, you eventually start to see life come back to the land. Come home from a shitty day at work and sit on a bench in a native plant garden that you created. Butterflies, moths, dragonflies, birds, lizards - all compose the living biosphere around you. Each has an evolutionary and ecological story to tell. All these things interacted and formed relationships with each other over vast quantities of time, forming the living fabric of the land as it existed before modern civilization came and put parking lots, fast food joints, and bix box stores on top of it.

Nothing defines sense of place like the native plants that grow there. We live in an age where place almost means nothing, because in a homogenous consumer culture every place looks the same - just as ugly and bland as the rest. Killing the lawn allows us to restore that sense of place to where we live, but more importantly it allows us to grow the plants that once formed the living skin of the land that we live on, and it allows us to develop a bond and connection with the living world around us, as human beings have done for hundreds of thousands of years.

It’s no great mystery that spending time in beautiful places filled with photosynthesizing, respiring green things makes humans feels good. These spaces are a part of us, and desiring to be around them is in our genome. We evolved in these places.

There’s no doubt in my mind that part of the reason the world feels so fucked up to so many of us is because we have no sense of place - no sense of self, no sense of connection - to the land that we live on. Having paved over and flattened most of our surrounding scenery, we are existentially lost as a species.

So you want to kill your lawn? And what would replace it?

How to get started?

Step 1 : Find the remaining last bits of “natural” areas that contain some fragmented remnants of the remaining native plant species that once grew in your area. Visit these places, document what you see and take pictures of plants that interest you. Let these photos serve as study notes. Upload your photos to an app like inaturalist (obscure the location for privacy purposes) and other users or the AI will identify them. Pay attention to what family they are in. The more you do this, the more you will start to notice shared traits whether it be horticultural tolerance, flower shape, phytochemistry (ie smell of crushed leaves) among the plants in that family. You are starting to become familiar with the plants around you. You will start to notice things you didn’t notice before.

Step 2. Connect with native plant societies in your area, visit native plant growers, find others to talk to about your newfound shared interest.

Step 3. KILL THE SHIT OUT OF YOUR LAWN. Rent a sodcutter from a local big box store or equipment supply company if you want it done quick. Otherwise, sheet-mulch with cardboard and overlay with free mulch or woodchips from a tree company that is in need of a place to dump. Use a service like chipdrop.com or call tree companies out of the yellow pages. Mulch can sometimes be very easy to come by for free.

Step 4. Start planting native plants that you purchase from a nursery or better yet from seed that you have collected from nearby patches of native plants yourself.

HOW TO COMPILE A SPECIES LIST OF NATIVE PLANTS FOR YOUR REGION USING THE INATURALIST APP :

Go to www.inaturalist.org and select the “explore” feature”. In the taxon (ie species) field, type “plants”. You can also search by plant order (ie “Asterales” - sunflower order), family (“Campanulaceae” - Lobelia family), genus (Lobelia), etc.

Next, go to the “location” field. You can search by continent, state/province, county, town etc. If the name of a particular place comes up in the suggestions that pop up once you type it, you can search it.

Click “go” and you will get a list of every plant that occurs within the boundaries of the location you typed in.

Under the “species” tab you will get a list of individual species (not just all the observations). Most species popping up will be native (ideally), but in heavily disturbed or urban areas, it is likely that many invasives or non-native horticultural species will pop up, too, so be sure to click the taxon name in order to be taken to the taxon page of that particular species where you will be able to read the wikipedia entry and see the plant’s distribution to confirm that it is indeed native to your area.

You can use this tool as a way to compile a list of potential native species to plant in your yard once you’ve killed the shit outta your lawn nice.