The Coalition was happy to receive this meaty response from Minnesota landscape designer John Moe and decided it belonged on our site.
Incredible web site! You've inspired me to revive my eco-friendly lawn blog. I've been advocating less lawn, and low input maintenance for what's left. And although nearly every landscape customer I've had for the past 25 years (and that number is well into the thousands) has asked for a low maintenance landscape design, their precious time magically frees up when I suggest that a shaggy lawn would slash their lawn-mowing in half and save them hundreds of dollars per year in water and fertilizer. It seems as if it’s never a problem for them to spend countless hours behind a noisy lawn mower. Nor is it a problem to subject their neighbors to the drone of their 5.5 hp walk-behinds. They cannot, however, be caught anywhere near shrubbery. There is a Ph.D. in anthropology in there somewhere.
The meadow garden has its own wonderful aesthetic. I bet there are genetic breadcrumbs within humans that let us appreciate tall grasses at an instinctual level. Our culture, however, has decided the tall grass is chaos, even dangerous and must be dominated, defeated, plowed under. Couple that with an urban infrastructure that practically orbits around the short green lawn and you have one tough upgrade to install.
The recent American Society of Landscape Architect annual meeting in Chicago featured educational sessions on green roofs, green walls, urban agriculture, sustainable projects on vast scales and (as if you didn't know) a meadow presentation by John Greenlee. I was not in that audience, but I spoke to someone who was. Mr. Greenlee wasn't merely preaching to the choir, he was preaching to the preachers. The same topics are being discussed at most other levels of the green industry, which include the lawn care and irrigation sectors.
And while many in the lawn care industry would be happy to keep plying their trade in exactly the same way, others can see opportunity in a more sustainable practice, even if their goal is still a bright green rug. Their attitude: Anyone can mow a lawn; it takes a professional to create a beautiful lawn with a minimum of chemicals and water. The turfgrass industry must be part of the overall solution, and moreover, be part of educating the public. They have direct (and exclusive) contact with the owners of most of the vast corporate and public lawns. It's a competitive industry that operates on the tightest of margins. Understanding and adopting sustainability should give a company a great competitive edge.
The irrigation industry is starting to see even more regulation. And while some aren't happy about the extra oversight, they have been competing on the basis of efficiency for quite some time now. Water costs their clients money. So irrigation system manufacturers are responding with more new technology than ever before. Smart controllers download weather data from satellites and make adjustments. High efficiency spray heads and advancements in drip systems are designed to reduce evaporation and place water more accurately. And more customers are using drip systems to water shrubs and other plantings, allowing those areas to remain relatively low maintenance for the customer and still require less water than the equivalent area of lawn.
But most of that water is still treated, potable water. We are spraying our lawns with higher quality water than most people on earth have to drink.
We would have a tough time regulating lawns out of existence, but we could at least change laws and ordinances that require highly manicured lawns.
In the Twin Cities there is a large rain garden effort that includes dozens of homes. It's a test project and is funded. Maybe someone has done this with low input lawns or meadow gardens at the same scale. If so, I'd like to hear about it. If not, maybe we could try it. People need to see that this could really work for them, that they could love it and be proud of it, not merely put up with it for the greater good.
John Moe is a landscape designer and associate member of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is a long-time member of the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association (MNLA) and serves on both the Environmental Concerns and Design committees. He regularly contributes articles to MNLA’s monthly publication “The Scoop” and is currently working on an MNLA task force, developing an outreach program to inform high school students about careers in the green industry. John lives in Coon Rapids, MN with his wife Sara and daughters Ellen and Eva.
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Photos by Evelyn Hadden of one of the many Twin Cities-area rain gardens mentioned by John in this piece - specifically, in the City of Maplewood, which has their very own rain garden website. From Evelyn:
It all started with one street reconstruction project where, instead of installing curbing and storm drains along one street to carry away excess stormwater runoff, funds and training were given to interested homeowners on that street to create rain gardens in their front yards.These photos taken in September 2007 showing show the extensive public rain garden in a Maplewood neighborhood park (Robinhood Park). As you can probably tell, they used a combination of showier garden plants at the top edges, with wet prairie natives in the center, and they included some fruit trees along the slopes.
