The lazy gardener’s guide

Where can you save money, time, and the planet simply by doing less? In your own backyard.

By Nathaniel Reade

People in Gig Harbor, Washington, had long complained about the embarrassing mess along a highway interchange in their town. It was a neglected, overgrown 3-acre plot of grass and invasive plants that did not reflect well on this handsome community of 12,000, south of Seattle on Puget Sound. So members of the Rotary Club of Gig Harbor volunteered to bring in their tractors and brush cutters to mow it down. Again, and again, and again. For years.

To club members Gary and Chris Pellett, this didn’t make much sense. Chris Pellett is a lifelong gardener who has worked with conservation groups, and her husband, Gary, had been in the plant business for 50 years. They knew that mown grass does nothing for birds, bees, or the pollinators our planet depends on, and it is arguably the most unnatural, expensive, carbon-intensive, and time-consuming ground cover available.

So the Pelletts suggested “rewilding.” Rather than mow those 3 acres eternally, they proposed planting trees and shrubs native to the area. Because native flora have evolved over millions of years to thrive in a particular spot, they tend to be far easier to grow and far better for the natural world. Once they’re planted and established, you can just walk away and relax, just as you might strolling through your local nature preserve.

Left: Chris Pellett (pictured) and her husband, Gary, proposed rewilding land along a highway interchange. Right: Members and friends of the Rotary Club of Gig Harbor worked to complete the planting. Courtesy of Gary Pellett

And how was their idea received? Well, says Gary Pellett, a kind and mild-mannered person, “there’s a lot of resistance to change in our species.”

The Pelletts and many other Rotary members who work to protect the environment point to the research of people like Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist and ecologist at the University of Delaware. Tallamy has sounded the alarm about the dangers of ignoring the needs of the planet when managing our land, from backyards to the sides of highways to city parks. He believes that many of us have an antagonistic relationship with the natural world we depend upon and irrational fears about wildlife — especially insects. “We must abandon our age-old notion ... that humans are here and nature is somewhere else,” Tallamy writes in his book Nature’s Best Hope.

Without pollinating insects, we would lose about 90 percent of the flowering plant species on Earth. The lack of native bumblebees in Australia, for instance, has pushed some commercial tomato growers to try robot bees, which cost $10,000 apiece to make. Insects are so essential to our survival that the biologist E.O. Wilson once said: “If all mankind were to disappear ... the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. But if insects were to vanish, the terrestrial environment would collapse into chaos.”

Plants and animals are declining at an alarming rate — it’s been called the sixth extinction — in large part because they are losing habitat to human development. That’s happening primarily through the expansion of cities, roads, farms, and ranches, but the replacement of native flora with mown grass in our yards also has a cumulative effect. In the United States, one study of suburban developments built between 1990 and 2005 found that 92 percent of the area available for landscaping was planted in lawn. Lawn covers about 45 million acres in the country today, almost as much as its national parks. Lawn is not only arguably the most expensive and high-maintenance ground cover, but it is what Tallamy calls a “biological wasteland.”

A colorful garden greets apartment dwellers in Shanghai. Weijie Gai (left) spearheaded the project. Courtesy of Weijie Gai

Tallamy has proposed that we manage our land in a way that considers not just neatness or convention, but also the natural world on which we depend. He points out that backyards in the United States collectively make up an ecosystem the size of New England, so a few simple changes could have a hugely beneficial impact on the planet. And one of the biggest things that has to change, he says, is our relationship to lawns.

Tallamy says that “lawns are terrible at delivering the essential ecosystem services we all depend on.” They produce less oxygen, cleanse less water, trap less carbon, provide no food to us or most other living things, and cost more time and money to maintain than other plantings. In the United States, lawn irrigation and other residential outdoor uses account for an average of more than 7 billion gallons of water daily. In arid parts of the Western U.S., up to 60 percent of household water use goes to irrigate lawns. Some cities and states, like Nevada, have placed restrictions on grass lawns, even requiring their removal from some properties in favor of less water intensive desert landscaping.

Half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to lawns runs off and contaminates our streams, rivers, and groundwater. Those big-box store bags of lawn chemicals are bad for the planet, and very possibly bad for you: About 40 percent of the chemicals used by the lawn care industry in the United States are banned in other countries as carcinogens, and scores of studies show a connection between lawn pesticides and lymphoma, with pets and children most at risk.

Why our obsession with the greensward? There isn’t a single definitive answer. Tallamy suggests that maybe a lawn planted feels like dangerous wilderness tamed. Others claim that fields of green appeal to our ancient heritage evolving on grassy African savannahs, where open vistas made us feel safe from threats. Some point out that in the early years of the U.S., wealthy tastemakers on their estates tried to display their sophistication by mimicking English manors and creating not only massive lawns, which were prohibitively expensive to maintain for most, but by planting shrubs and trees from Europe and Asia. Two centuries later, we still equate a yard of clipped grass and nonnative shrubs trimmed to resemble green meatballs as signs of wealth and success. It could also be the lawn chemical and machinery companies busily telling us that grubs or clover reveal our moral failure. Or maybe it’s just ignorance: One of the simplest things you can do to a yard is mow it. And this isn’t just an American thing; in 2022, 65 percent of the revenue from lawn mower sales came from outside North America.

Whatever the reason, experts today point out that the lawn, riding mower, weed killers, bug killers, annual mulching, and leaf removal are all busywork, expensive and harmful to the natural world on which we depend. We could all save money, carbon, wildlife, and our own time if we simply did less lawn care. The win-win, in other words, is rewilding, which we could also call lazy gardening.