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FeedGenius at Work
By leslie pilgrim
A few years after we were married, my husband and I bought our first (and, perhaps last) home: a sad, ugly place with good bones, olive and rust shag carpet, and a half-acre yard with one lonely blue spruce. After the closing, I cried tears that had nothing to do with joy. This was not the lovely starter home of my dreams, but a home that would need lots of love, elbow grease, and cold cash to transform.Fast-forward twenty years and the most miraculous change that has taken place in our homestead is not inside our house, but outside. Our once barren lot—an endless lawn that took hours to slog through with the mower—is now filled with trees, bushes, and perennials. Pine, redbud, fir, crabapple, magnolia, dogwood, and a perennial garden with a life of its own (I prefer to refer to it as a “habitat,” rather than a “garden,” which implies something under control) now occupy the property.
Filling our half-acre has been a learning experience. Some of the trees we planted were invaded with apple scab or Zimmerman pine moth. Other planting adventures that seemed like a good idea at the time turned out more like sensational headlines—“Creeping Charlie Hiding in Host Donated by Neighbor Takes Over the World”—or B-movie plots—“Invasion of the Oriental ‘Limelight Artemisia’.” After numerous gardening escapades, we came up with a plot of our own: “Genius Suburban Couple Reduces Lawn to a Few Lovely Blades of Grass.” While we love a verdant lawn as much as anyone, weeding, feeding, watering, and mowing are not our favorite pastimes.
Over the years, my husband and I have shrunk our lawn by mulching a good portion of it. Curving lines of mulch and edging, shrubs, trees, and grasses now ring the yard. It looks nice. Our neighbors give thumbs up to what we have done. We want to keep them happy because they are good neighbors and good people. So we hope they approve of the next phase of our grass-elimination project.
Grass elimination became a more pressing goal after the Minnesota drought of 2006. We tend not to water our grass much, figuring the reason for planting grass in the first place is that it usually withstands a beating from the summer sun. And most years, this is true. Our grass comes back beautifully in September after a dry July or August. But after this particularly parched summer season, our grass didn’t bounce back. It died. So we raked it out of much of our yard, prepped the dry ground, added new soil and seed, and watered. It was a backbreaking effort that we don’t ever want to do again.
Our local garden center suggested we replace the dead grass in some obscure portions of our lawn with resilient white clover. Drought-resistant white clover needs little mowing and no fertilizing. I remember my mother letting the clover grow long in the yard so it would reseed. She loved clover—especially its delicate scent—and so, in my adulthood, it is also lovely to me. Clover is a practical alternative to grass (or grass adjunct), especially at cabins or in areas that aren’t regularly viewed by neighbors who may not appreciate its finer qualities.
But white clover is only part of our grass alternative. On the south side of our lawn is a sweep of pines, quaking aspen, dogwood, and decorative grasses. Mowing around this area is a pain, but doing anything else with this part of the yard would require massive quantities of mulch, edging, and labor. Instead, we contemplate adding eco-grass to the mix. Eco-grass is a beautiful, durable, decorative fescue that is often seen flowing in the breeze on golf courses. We dreamily picture it swaying gently in our yard, requiring little water and only a rare mowing.
But that’s a project for another season. We gaze out at our landscape, pleased with what we have done to this minuscule piece of the planet. We visualize a yard that, in time, will boast a slender green swath of grass that takes almost no resources to maintain—a lawn reduced to a few beautiful blades of grass. Genius. At least we think so.
Leslie Pilgrim lives in Mendota Heights.
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