The pendulum is swinging back towards lawn moderation. Our national obsessional experiment with lawn perfection, fueled by horticultural, social, and marketing blitzes, is slowing down.
During the advent of herbicides and inexpensive mowers, both of which have only come about in my parents’ lifetime, we were told over and over by magazine and TV ads paid for by the burgeoning new lawn care industry and pushed by garden journalists looking for upbeat angles and civic-minded garden clubbers, that unless we had a nice lawn, we weren’t decent people.
I watched this unfold starting with my early years mowing mixed clover, bermudagrass, and ground ivy for spending money. I had a choice between a clunky reel-type push mower and my grandmother’s even then-antique smoke-belching chain-driven behemoth that was hard to crank on the best of days; seeing my struggles, my dad helped me get a newly introduced lightweight gas-powered mower that could be pulled yard to yard behind my bicycle.
I later worked in a garden center and watched the attitude shift as alluring new fertilizers, herbicides, and then weed and feed blends made their moves on eager consumers. In the 1970s I helped install irrigation systems and went on to study turf management at MSU to become a golf course and home lawn advisor.
So, yeah, I understand and admire what it takes. And no question, taking pride in a neatly mowed lawn helps preserve our sanity and makes us feel like we have a grip on things in a rapidly changing world. However, except in a few neighborhoods with HOAs, a perfect lawn is no longer the hallmark of good citizenship; in some areas it is actually being seen negatively, a throwback to the days when we didn’t care about the environment and proved our worth through our lawns. A not-so-subtle pushback is gaining steam as we acknowledge the daunting downsides to attempting a near-perfect lawn and rethink the time, equipment, and frustrating chemistry of products that often simply don’t work well on Southern weeds, or the expense of hiring it all out. The idea that a uniform, weed-free lawn can be maintained easily and sustainably is finally relaxing back into the more practical mow-what-grows ethos similar to how it was done when I was a kid.
The trick is in having a decent lawn to begin with. Fact: If you mow too close all the time you will have a thin weedy lawn in need of regular herbicide treatment. Ditto if you over fertilize or never fertilize, or where you never water at all or overuse an irrigation system (more than once a week). Mow right, fertilize lightly, water deeply but not frequently: These are the keys to a thick, healthy lawn.
Call it thrifty, ecologically correct, lazy, or blame millennials, but both older and younger folks are slipping away from the perfect lawn hype. Some are going for more smaller throw-rugs rather than wall-to-wall carpet, using groups of trees and shrubs, mulches, and groundcovers.
But in the past few years there has developed a healthy appreciation for leaving a bit of clover and violets here and there, including churchyards with a standing-in-the-gap stewardship, and more folks actually sowing white clover in the fall and enjoying the pollinator-friendly No Mow March movement; even award-winning major flower shows both here and abroad now include a few little wildflowers in their lawn displays as a sign of good gardening.
There are better ways than the lawn to pin your social- and self-worth onto. Raise your mower a notch or two, then just mow what grows. It’s easy and works. And it’s okay.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
