Of Lawns and Men

I remember when my big sister was dating a student studying agriculture at the local university. He came to pick her up for a date one night and parked by the curb. He only made it a few steps across the lawn before he got down on his hands and knees and started pawing through it. We wondered if he'd lost something, and followed my sister toward him.

"Mr. and Mrs. Smith! You have a beautiful lawn!" he exclaimed, continuing to paw through the grass. My sister stood by, embarassed and trying to pull him up as he quizzed my mother. "What kind of seed did you use, or was it sod? How often do you fertilize it?" He couldn't believe that the answer was, "We don't use fertilizer." He wanted to know everything - "How often do you water it? How often do you mow it?" He oohed and aahhed over the texture.

My sister finally managed to pry him away from the lawn. "We have to GO. We'll be late," she said as she struggled to get him back on his feet. She dragged him toward the car as he waved over his shoulder. "Goodbye, Mrs. Smith! You have a beautiful lawn!" The scene became one of those family stories that we told for years afterward.

My parents always did have a beautiful lawn. My mother, however, is in the process of trying to replace her front lawn. She's 82 and walks with a walker or a cane. Her house sits on an acre and a third. She's never empoyed a gardener or a lawn service, and something has to give. The first step is to either kill the grass or to cut it out with a sod cutter. She chose the cheapest, lowest effort option, which is to kill the grass.

I'm watching her go through some of the same things I did when I replaced our front lawn. "I haven't watered it all year! Look at all that green!" she says now, just a few days away from the beginning of July. "What's it going to take?" Luckily for her, it's finally turning yellow and crunchy.

Also luckily for her, seventeen years after my experience, replacing a lawn is a much more common occurrance. No one is looking at her as though she has two heads. I mentioned to my friend Alicia today that Mom was taking out her lawn, and without any hesitation, Alicia said, "So she's xeriscaping?" Yes! She is! Thank you for knowing what that is! Mom's not likely to get comments like the one my postman made to me - "I can understand not liking grass, but not liking grass? What's wrong with you?" He thought he was wildly funny. I did not.

Here's my fifteen year old lawn essay. As I post it, I'm hoping for a less time consuming experience for my mom.

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I tried to kill my lawn. In fact, I tried very hard.

Now, I know this is tantamount to sacrilege. Most people are obsessed with their lawns. As Dave Barry so succinctly put it, "People would rather live next door to a pervert, communist pornographer than someone with an unkempt lawn."

I grew up in the desert. Our water for the summer months depended on the snow that fell in the mountains during the winter. When there was little snow, or when the population grew, (or usually, both,) watering restrictions would be put in place. You could only water your yard during certain days and certain hours on those days. It nearly drove my father berserk. "What do they expect us to do, LET OUR LAWNS DIE?" he would ask, in a tone that suggested such a thing was right up there with sacrificing our firstborn. Many fierce letters to the editor were written defending the right to water a lawn every day.

My parents had lovely lawn, both in the front and in the back. But, since they owned over an acre of property around the house, the percentage of lawn was actually very small. They had four patios, three driveways, rock gardens, produce gardens, shrubbery, flower beds, many trees, walkways and benches, plus a dog kennel, and a pasture for the horses. I never saw any reason to elevate the lawn in status to be THE symbol of the yard.

My father was convinced, as many people are, that a lawn is a delicate thing in need of pampering. My father-in-law is in a class by himself.

He lives in the same desert city I grew up in. Watering restrictions are now an accepted part of the summer months, not something that will occasionally be enforced due to drought. Tickets can and will be issued to water wasters, as determined by municipal code. My father-in-law thumbs his nose at the code. Nobody's going to tell HIM how much water he can use, by golly. He lavishes water on his lawn, which is admittedly green and lovely, with no bare patches.

In the front yard, things are pretty OK. In the back yard, out of the neighbors' sight, it's a bit different. His reasoning is that he has dogs, and the urine needs to be diluted and washed away.

He has had to lay thick metal mesh in parts of the lawn, so that you can walk on it without your feet sinking. Moss grows in the squares of the mesh. Moss! This is in the Nevada desert, not Seattle. Other parts of the lawn often squelch. But what really did me in were the frogs.

One summer, frogs appeared in my in-laws' back yard. Not just one, but frogs, plural - dozens of them. They frolicked happily through the swampiness. I have no idea how they got there. There are no natural bodies of water for miles. There's an irrigation ditch about half a mile away, but that half a mile encompasses a high school, convenience stores, neighborhoods and one of the busiest streets in town. I cannot imagine how far these frogs had to drag themselves across the burning asphalt to even find my in-laws' yard. Yet, there they were. It was the first time I ever saw my father-in-law admit that yes, maybe he did water too heavily.

I would rather have many other features rather than a lawn. I'm not talking here about paving over my front yard, or covering it in plastic and laying rock of uniform color and size from fence to fence - one of the reasons that traditional front lawns don't interest me is that they're a vast expanse of sameness. When you add to that all the mowing and upkeep a lawn takes, the choice for me is easy. If you're not picnicking or playing volleyball, why do you want grass? That's my theory. When you add that to the fact that my husband and I are both allergic to grass, well, decision made.

In our previous house, we moved onto a vacant lot. Everything that was put in the yard, with the exception of one tree almost on the property line, we put in.

A friend came to visit us shortly after we'd put a redwood deck across the front of the house. We'd prepared and leveled part of the yard in preparation for buying sod. I pointed out where we'd be laying it. To give you an idea of the size of this lawn, we brought all the freshly cut and rolled sod home in our mini-van. My friend looked mildly puzzled and said, "What are you going to do with the rest of it?" I showed her where the vegetable garden went, and the flower beds, and the kids' play yard, and the patio, and the gravel pathway, and the shed, and she still looked puzzled.

When we moved into our current house, most of the landscaping was over twenty years old. The first thing I did was tear out the perimeter of the front lawn and replace it with flower beds. The lawn itself was patchy and ugly, and it didn't take too long for me to decide, it all comes out.

The first step, I figured, was to kill the grass. That shouldn't be too hard, I thought. I'll just stop watering it. After all, it's Nevada, and the weather's warm. So I waited; two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, two months. The grass was still green! Not even yellow, but green! In the summertime! We waited another month; still green. The fact that our entire front yard is shaded, courtesy of two mature trees, influenced things, I'm sure, as did the fact that the spray from our neighbor's automatic sprinklers reach a good twenty-four inches into the north side of my yard. But still - I couldn't tell the difference between the unwatered lawn and the one I'd used gallons of water on.

Finally I got tired of waiting. I asked my husband to till it under. So, we took all the edging from around the flower beds out, and he got out the rototiller. I have no idea what the neighbors thought when they saw us tilling under perfectly green grass. I raked and sifted to get all the clumps of roots, and threw them out.

We'd planned what we wanted to do with the front yard. We wanted larger flower beds, a pond, and maybe a bench, with a path winding through. We also wanted to widen the driveway by about three feet. First, though, we had to dig a large hole next to the house to fix a plumbing leak. Then, we had to set the pond.

After exhaustive pond shopping – my husband never makes snap decisions in these matters – we found what we wanted and could afford. Then, we discovered that the tree roots, not to mention our rock-hard clay soil, made any hope of digging down two feet or so impractical. Even if we made it, the roots would wreak havoc on a pond liner. Back to the drawing board we went, and decided on a fountain. Fountain shopping took longer than pond shopping.

The hole next to the house was there for so long that we began to feel it was a permanent design feature. We began calling it The Pit of Despair. (It was a carryover from the name our nieces gave the pit in our previous yard. Fans of "The Princess Bride" will know exactly what we're talking about.) We managed to widen the driveway with pavers. But, we had to abandon our first pathway choice, wood rounds, when they proved to be too easily kicked out of place by the children. I didn't want to plant too many flowers, lest we trample them during the rest of the construction. Once we chose a fountain, my husband wanted a raised bed to sit it in. That was quite a job, especially since the yard has a pronounced slope. Then, a trench had to be dug to run the wiring out to the fountain. What with one thing and another, the front yard was mostly dirt and holes for years.

Finally, the trench is buried, the fountain's in place, the Pit will go soon – it's time to start planting again. I bought seeds and plants, and giddily set about planting them.

Now that the ground is being watered again – did I mention that it hadn't been for TWO SOLID YEARS? – guess what's happening? Yes, the flowers are looking very nice, thank you, but coming up around them is GRASS! I'm going out now and digging it up, pulling up root clumps the size of oranges; sometimes, even cantaloupes. This is not crabgrass or some other noxious weed, it's the very grass that used to comprise our lawn.

Soon it should be gone, I think. I hope. But when people start complaining about how watering restrictions will kill their lawn, well, they shouldn't say it to me.