People choose to substitute native grass lawns for conventional turfgrass when they want part of
their garden to have a carpeted look or be used for walking or running activities, but they don't
want to embrace the regimen of chores that conventional lawns require. They may also be concerned
about excessive water use, health hazards of chemicals in pesticides and fertilizers, and
environmental effects of fossil fuel-powered lawn tools.
A native grass lawn may fit your needs and give extra benefits over traditional turfgrass.
Installing a native grass area requires work and money up front, but is expected to repay the
gardener with a healthier lawn that needs little or no water, uses no pesticides or fertilizers,
and needs less frequent or no mowing.
Native grass lawns take different forms depending on their projected use and the gardener's
personal taste. And of course, different grasses are native to different regions.
Look #1: Grass looks like traditional turf—clipped short and remaining green through the
growing season.
In some situations, turf can be an effective use of land--to handle foot traffic or play activities,
if you'd rather control weeds with a mower than hand-weed or use chemicals, to control populations of
mice and bugs, as a fire break near a building, or as a green expanse to open up the view. Some North American native
grasses and sedges "give you the opportunity to have a
lawnlike planting of indigenous species while eliminating the need to apply fertilizer regularly,
mow every week, and use herbicides," writes noted author Stevie Daniels in
the introduction
to Easy Lawns, the Brooklyn Botanical
Garden's slim introduction to native North American grass lawns. (Daniels wrote a detailed primer,
The Wild Lawn Handbook, now out-of-print
but still available in some used bookstores.)
Look #2: Grass is longer than turf, makes a green carpet 4 to 8 inches high.
A longer lawn can survive drought and temperature extremes better and feed itself without fertilizer.
Less formal than a manicured lawn, it can provide a neutral area in a landscape but with a flowing
texture and lush appearance that ultra-short turf lacks.
- Buffalo grass
For this look, you can also use buffalo grass. In The Undaunted Garden, Colorado author
Lauren Springer writes that her unmowed buffalo grass lawn "is too short to sway in the breeze."
It stands up well to the daily traffic of neighborhood children to and from school, and it "never
gets more than four to six inches tall and is a soft-textured gray-green."
Buffalo grass seeds
produce both male and female grasses on separate plants (the technical term is
dioecious), and male plants send up seedheads on thin
stalks above the leaves. Gardeners who want an uninterrupted surface of leaves will need to either
mow every couple of weeks during the growing season or pay more to use only female plants. Female
plants also produce seedheads, but they are shorter than the leaves and therefore hidden from view.
They are available in plugs or as sod.
- Mixed fescues
Use a mix of red fescue (Festuca rubra) and hard fescue (Festuca ovina var.
duriuscula), cool-season grasses 6-8 inches tall
that grow best in the northern U.S. in areas with medium rainfall. Fescue species are
clump-forming, but some cultivars that spread have been
developed, and these will create a more solid, continuous planting. Mow once in early spring to
remove dead leaves and once after flowering to remove stalks. Don't fertilize.
Neil Diboll, owner of Prairie Nursery in Wisconsin, developed a "no-mow" seed mix containing six
varieties of fescue. He says the average height is six inches or less, but "it can reach a height
of eighteen inches if it flowers (which doesn't happen often)." Miriam Goldberger of Wildflower Farms markets a (not entirely native) mixed fescue eco-lawn. Read her LessLawn article about it.
- Sedge
For partly shaded areas, try sedges. These clumping,
grasslike plants will make a loose carpet that can be easily interplanted with bulbs and other
flowering plants. However, they won't stand up to heavy foot traffic. Many are not hardy north of
Zone 6; Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica) is an exception, hardy across much of the
eastern and northern U.S. and Canada. In a chapter of
Easy Lawns, John Greenlee of Greenlee Nursery in Pomona, California, suggests that
sedges be mowed two to three times per year at most and that chemical fertilizers, pesticide,
and herbicides should not be used on sedges.
Look #3: Grasses grow to their natural heights and are mixed with flowering plants in a meadow
or prairie.
Grasses mixed with wildflowers make a colorful carpet, taller than a traditional lawn but alive
with activity. Use this type of planting to create a rewarding vista or stroll garden.
You may need to mow a few times during the first year to keep broadleaf weeds and woody species
from taking over while the grasses establish. After they have established, leave seed stalks up all
winter to provide food for birds, then mow or burn annually in mid-spring before the ground-nesting
birds build nests. You may choose to mow or burn only one-third of the area each year to allow
butterflies to reproduce.
Do not fertilize meadows or prairies, advises Nigel Colborn in The Garden Floor, because "the more
fertile the soil, the more successfully the grass will compete, driving out the wildflowers."
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