Is Your Yard An Ecological Dead Zone?

Editorial by Lauren Parmelee, Senior Director of Education

My fifteen-mile commute to work is a typical suburban drive past houses, strip malls, churches, and light industry. As I drive from Newport to Bristol, with all the traffic lights, I have plenty of time to contemplate my surroundings. What always stands out is also typical, unfortunately. Areas that aren’t paved are covered in mowed green grass. No patches of wildflowers or orchards, and few wooded lots. Just lots and lots of sod.

Turf grass lawns and golf courses cover 40 million acres of the United States. Four times more land is dedicated to lawns than the number one U.S. agricultural crop – corn. Four times more water is used to keep lawns green than is used to grow hay, which is the next in line at the hose. That’s a lot of dedication to a monoculture on the part of Americans.

Dr. Doug Tallamy, author of The Living Landscape, Bringing Nature Home and Nature of Oaks, describes lawns as ecological dead zones. “Lawns don’t do anything that we need every landscape to do, which is sequester carbon, manage the watershed, support a food web and support pollinators.”

How did we get trapped in this paradigm?

In America, lawns first appeared in public spaces like town commons and public parks, and then expanded to individual properties. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), “the American father of landscape architecture”, who not only designed Central Park but put his talented stamp on much of Newport, was a primary influencer of green lawn spaces.

After World War II, the GI Bill helped returning white soldiers get college educations that resulted in good paying jobs that helped them buy their own houses situated on small plots of land. 40-hour work weeks gave people time to tend to this outdoor space, as well as the house. Vegetable gardens moved to the backyard and the perfect green lawn rolled into the white middle-class American Dream.

It’s time to break out of this pattern.

Take action to “rewild” some or all of your yard! Shrinking your grass doesn’t mean giving up the barbecue patio or the kids’ play area, but it does mean setting aside dedicated space and ceasing the use of herbicides and pesticides.

Doug Tallamy’s research indicates that for a landscape to support a diversity of life, at least 70% of the plant species must be native. Native plants and trees support native wildlife including the insects that are so critical to healthy ecosystems.

When transforming your yard, it is important to find a source of true native plants and not just cultivars that have been manipulated through hybridization. It also is critical that you don’t purchase seeds or plants that have been coated with neonicotinoid pesticides. This means you must be picky about where you purchase your plants.

Rewilding can also mean being lazy about raking leaves, dead-heading flowers, and mowing. Give away that leaf blower and weed whacker, and cheer on the bumblebees instead.

Encourage your local greenhouses to grow and sell native plants!

University of Rhode Island has an excellent database of the trees, shrubs, vines, ferns and perennials that are native to the state. In addition to listing the plants, the database indicates what each species needs to grow, how it supports wildlife, whether it’s edible or medicinal, and how big it will get. Visit web.uri.edu/rinativeplants.

The Rhode Island Wild Plant Society (riwps.org) has a lot of great information on why growing native is beneficial. Native Plant Trust in Wayland, MA (formerly called Garden in the Woods) is another excellent source, but a little farther from home. Visit nativeplanttrust.org.