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FeedLandscaping the Natural Way
When Richard and Barbara Barnes built their walkout rambler on Big Carnelian Lake, north of Stillwater, in 1990, they cleared their yard down to the lake and planted a lawn to the shoreline—just as many of their neighbors had done. “We had a typical grass-and-sand beach,” Barbara says.
Several years later—years spent mowing, weeding, and maintaining their lawn—they attended a presentation by the local watershed district on how natural lakescaping improves lake quality. They liked what they heard and decided to do their part.
In 2001, sharing the cost of plants and labor with the Carnelian-Marine Watershed District, the Barnes’s began replacing their lawn with plugs of native sedges, grasses, and wildflowers. Five years later, the hard work is paying off, and the plants are filling in nicely.
“Come about July it gets really beautiful,” Barbara says. “We have lots of flowering wild plants.” The swath to the water’s edge now includes black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, sedges, and little bluestem. “It’s very easy,” says Barbara. “This year I pulled a few long grasses. Most of the time it just kind of grows by itself.”
Spreading the Word
At a time when more people than ever are building homes on Minnesota’s lakeshores, our lakes would be cleaner and healthier if homeowners followed the Barnes’s example, conservationists say. A swath of natural or restored woodland or prairie between home and lake helps filter out pollutants and the nutrients that cause a lake to go green with algae. Natural aquatic plants protect the shoreline from erosion and provide habitat for game fish. And, as the Barnes and many others have discovered, in the long run, natural “lakescaping” cuts down on mowing and other yard work.
The practice seems to be slowly catching on. “We’re getting the most interest from people who are conservation-minded already and know that lawns down to the shoreline are not the best thing,” says Leilani Peterson, shoreline habitat specialist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Shoreland Habitat Program. The DNR is spreading the word to others as well, conducting workshops on natural lakescaping with lake associations and working with local officials who deal with lakeshore development and zoning.
Favoring woodlands and native plants over manicured lawns is gaining urgency, especially as more and larger homes sprout up along the state’s lakeshores.
“The lakes are really the new centers of urbanization from 1970 on,” says George Orning, research fellow with the University of Minnesota College of Natural Resources and former director of its Sustainable Lake Project. “If you start at Mille Lacs, you can walk to Bemidji and never leave a township or city that hasn’t grown 20 percent in the last decade.”
With this exodus to lake country, woodlands become yards, and landowners don’t stop at water’s edge. “Most people I’m dealing with want to remove vegetation from the lake,” says Jed Anderson, DNR aquatic plant management specialist in Glenwood. “They want to do whatever it takes to get the job done. They want a sugar-sand beach.”
The result of this development, says Paul Radomski, a DNR research scientist, is lost aquatic vegetation. Aerial photos of shoreline indicate that developed shorelines have on average 66 percent less aquatic vegetation than undeveloped ones, he says. Nearly one-third of Minnesota’s shallow emergent water plants—cattails, bulrushes, and arrowhead—have been casualties of development, Radomski estimates. That’s a lot of missing habitat and natural filtration.
Lake Life
Who needs a bunch of weeds, anyway? For starters, wildlife such as mink, muskrats, beavers, waterfowl, and shorebirds.
Anderson describes a basswood forest that once stretched along the shore of Lobster Lake, just west of Alexandria. As the land was subdivided and sold, one buyer cleared his property, leaving only a large tree at either corner of his lot near the water’s edge. On each tree, he hung a wood-duck house. When Anderson visited, the landowner declared, “I just love wildlife.”
“That’s the mentality out there,” says Anderson.
What else needs aquatic plants? Fish, which use waterweeds for spawning, nursery areas, and ambush cover. In his studies of lake life, Radomski found that lakes with a higher occurrence of some types of aquatic vegetation also tended to have more bluegills, pumpkinseeds, and northern pike.
But the main benefit to landowners of leaving natural vegetation along shore is this: Fertilized or not, lawns increase phosphorus runoff into lakes and streams, and phosphorus drives unsightly algae blooms that turn lakes murky and smelly.
Lawns produce eight times as much total phosphorous runoff as natural woodlands, according to individual studies by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Geological Survey. They also allow about 10 times as much water runoff, carrying silt into waterways and potentially causing erosion. Though phosphorous can be carried by soil and rainwater, the study found that by filtering runoff, natural buffer strips significantly reduce the amount that drains into lakes and streams.
Converts
Carolyn Dindorf, a limnologist and environmental writer, bought her home on Magda Lake, a tiny lake in Brooklyn Park, about seven years ago. The shoreline was wooded, but lawn covered a steep slope near the house. “I killed that off the first fall I was there,” she says. “I thought it was dangerous to mow. And it was really not useful. What can you do on a lawn that’s on a steep slope? I’d rather have something that would attract songbirds and butterflies.” So she planted native plants, including sedges, irises, swamp milkweed, and bulrushes.
Dindorf does her part to spread the word about natural lakescaping. She co-authored Lakescaping for Wildlife and Water Quality (Minnesota’s Bookstore, 1999) and contributed to a CD-ROM about lakeshore management. She works for Fortin Consulting, an environmental consulting firm in Hamel, and has led workshops to train would-be landscapers. “We like working with do-it-yourselfers so they’re involved in some way,” she says.
Bob and Barb Greifzu are among the converts. When they first bought their place on the shores of McGregor’s Big Sandy Lake in 1978, “being ignorant, first-time lakeshore owners, we decided to clear even more vegetation,” Bob says. “It was starting to look like a city lot. Then every weekend we had to come up and cut the grass and clean the beach.”
A decade ago, Bob, a member of the lake association board, attended a meeting at Long Lake Conservation Center. He learned what happens to water quality and wildlife habitat when a lakeshore is stripped. “They challenged us to do something,” he recalls.
He decided to take the challenge. He joined a pilot shoreline restoration project run through the Aitkin office of the University of Minnesota Agricultural Extension Service. The Greifzus planted sedges, irises, swamp milkweed, and more. Various wildflowers took root on their own. Bob also planted bulrush and arrowhead in the shallows, installing temporary plywood barriers to protect young plants from waves.
Now, Bob says, “It’s totally wild. I let whatever grows, grow there. I find that by doing that I reduce my twice weekly lawn duties.” He also discourages the Canada geese that tramp his neighbors’ lawns. (Geese avoid walking through tall plants.) “Anything that is running off our property is filtered through about 20 to 30 feet of vegetation before it gets to the lake.”
Over the years, more lakeshore owners around Big Sandy have joined the effort, he says. “We’re looking at so much more vegetation on the shoreline, it’s really encouraging. I think people are getting the idea that the less they do to the shore, the less they have to do at the shore.”
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