I live in Colorado where the summers are hot and dry. If you want a lawn here, you’ve got to irrigate it throughout the growing season or else it won’t stand a chance.
Back where I grew up everyone had a huge, lush lawn, no irrigation necessary. So naturally when I bought my home in Colorado and I had my first yard to call my own, I wanted what I knew, deep, green, and oh so lush Kentucky BlueGrass.
Kentucky Blue was the gold standard in my mind.
Poor Decisions on Repeat
The home my husband and I purchased already had the lawn I was familiar with. Hooray!
Not too long after moving in I decided to add the flowers and shrubs I had also grown up with. Never in a million years did I think about where I was living (the desert), and whether or not the grass or plants I was putting in were adapted to life in the desert.
No shock – they were not.
So I spent the first 14 years in my home watering, and watering, and watering, and fertilizing, and cutting my lawn.
It looked…okay. It also took a lot of time and effort. Boo.
The Kentucky Blue was thriving with all of the attention, but some of the flowers refused to exist in the dry heat regardless of how much water I dumped on them.
Eventually I gave up on most of the flowers and some of the shrubs.
Truth be told, I spent a small fortune buying and killing plants in my yard over the years.
Clearly I’m a slow learner in this area.
I’d been reading about killing your lawn for awhile and I saw a few Xeric front yards here and there but they all looked messy to me. My grass looked neat and clean. It looked familiar. Anything else looked blah and weedy.
I stuck with my Kentucky Blue.
I Finally Saw The Light
Then one day I read Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard by Douglas Tallamy and it hit me like a ton of bricks. What the heck was I doing!?
I was fighting nature…and I was losing!
Seriously, I should have known better. I worked for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations for over twenty years! I knew all about the importance of biodiversity and water conservation. I knew about the importance of native plants and species.
How was it possible that I was so blind when it came to my very own yard?
Of course my yard looked like poo, I was planting all the wrong things. I was trying to recreate my New England yard IN COLORADO! HELLO!
It seemed like overnight I realized that my Kentucky Blue had to go and I had to replace it with something that actually wanted to be there. That very day I decided to kill my lawn and replace it with plants that are native to the arid West.
Thankfully my husband is on board with pretty much anything I want to do related to our house and yard. By the time I suggest something to him he knows I’ve been thinking about and researching it for months so he just says, “So when are we doing this? Tomorrow?”
He gets me!
Why I Decided to Kill My Lawn and Replace it With Native Plants
So after years of thinking that Xeric yards looked bad, and Kentucky Blue was the only way to go, why did I decide to kill my lawn and replace it with native plants? It came down to four reasons.
- Water Conservation
- Biodiversity
- Native Habitat really is Beautiful (and necessary)
- Hardscaping is Hot
Water Conservation
Here in Colorado we pay for our water. We live in a desert so water is not plentiful. You pay for what you use. Which is as it should be.
Eventually it hit me that it was foolish to spend money on water that was supporting plants that don’t want to be here. I was literally wasting money and when I thought about it, it bothered me. I hate wasting money.
Also, after working in the world of water conservation for over 20 years, I know far too much about how dire our freshwater situation truly is.
I’m not going to list all of the sad and scary facts here, but I’m not exaggerating when I say we are in real trouble when it comes to how much freshwater we’ve got left on our planet. The time to conserve water was yesterday.
Biodiversity
Humans are not separate from the natural world. We are a part of it. And every part of it plays a role in the success of every other part.
If we want bees to pollinate our food supply, we’ve got to provide those bees with a habitat in which they can survive. It’s that simple.
If you want to see birds, butterflies, and bees, and all of the other lovely critters that live where you live, you’ve got to give them a place to eat, sleep, and reproduce.
Kentucky BlueGrass lawns are a monoculture. They support almost zero species. Okay they support bunnies. I’ll give them that.
Also, this is going to blow your mind, grass is actually the biggest irrigated crop in the United States. How crazy is that? The biggest irrigated crop in the U.S. isn’t even something we can eat! It provides almost zero benefit, aside from looking nice.
Native gardens support a huge variety of critters including: song birds, butterflies, moths, dragonflies, birds of prey. The list goes on and on.
And after reading Douglas Tallamy’s book, I learned that many native bees will only pollinate native plants. Native butterflies and moths will only eat and lay their eggs on native plants. And many native song birds will only eat native butterflies and moths when they are in their catapillar stage.
So……you need native plants if you want to continue seeing the incredibly diverse array of magnificent species that are native to your area!
I could really geek out on this because I think it’s SO cool.
Native Habitat IS Beautiful
We’ve all been conditioned to think that big, green lawns are beautiful. You see a lawn like that and you immediately assume the homeowner cares, and you just know they have the means to keep a lawn like that thriving. We’ve been taught to automatically equate manicured lawns with status.
But when you really start to think about it, they are also really boring. They don’t have a lot going on aside from the grass and plantings along the perimeter. They certainly don’t have any life. And they all kind of look the same.
When you kill your lawn and replace it with natives, and you think about the numerous benefits your natives provide, you truly start to see its beauty.
Look at that gorgeous, bushy, yellow rabbitbrush in the photo above. It is native to where I live and I think it’s just lovely. So do the butterflies!
Admittedly it took me a while to see the beauty in a drought tolerant lawn, but once I finally saw and appreciated it for what it is, I look at it differently. Now I really do see the beauty.
Also, do we really want every state in the U.S. to look like every other state when it comes to yards? Wouldn’t it be a lot more interesting if everyone had a yard full of native trees, plants, and shrubs?
So when you were in Massachusetts you marveled at the Smooth Beardtongue. And when you were in Texas you smiled at the the Turk’s Cap.
On top of that, those native plants would be attracting native species so you’d see the birds and butterflies that live in Massachusetts and the birds and butterflies that live in Texas.
Personally, I think this would be a lot more beautiful and a lot more interesting.
Hardscaping is Hot
Some folks decide to ditch their lawn and replace it with hardscaping like rocks and/or fake grass.
Yes this absolutely cuts down on water usage. But it is also really, really hot in the summer. In fact, a hardscaped yard can reach temps upwards of 130 degrees in the summer. Yikes!
If you surround your home with a heat source like this, you’re going to have to really fight to keep your house cool in the summer.
This is reason alone for me to avoid this approach.
Plus, fake grass is plastic. Clearly you’re not going to attract any butterflies with plastic.
Final Thoughts
So these are the main reasons I decided almost overnight that I had to kill my lawn and replace it with natives.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where I will outline the various techniques you can use to kill your lawn.
Have you considered killing your lawn, or have you already done it? What was your inspiration and how’s it going?
