<
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250425-meadowscaping-the-people-turning-their-garden-lawns-into-wild-meadows>
'When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in
Pennsylvania, they knew they didn't want a perfectly manicured front lawn like
their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf – a
flourishing, wild meadow home to diverse species of plants and animals.
It was a bold plan, to be sure, considering it involved overhauling their
entire lawn when they were new to the neighbourhood. Thankfully, Weaner Cooper
had ideal support for the project – her father is Larry Weaner, a renowned
ecological landscape designer (she is now executive director of the educational
arm of his design firm). The landscape design style he uses relies
predominantly on native plants, she says, aiming to work with how they want to
grow rather than forcing them into particular areas.
She grew up with a non-traditional garden curated by her father, which she
remembers as a "woodland wonderland" because it was designed to support large
trees. Today, it's still heavily wooded and teems with other native plants that
prefer a shadier plot (his property gets less light than the Coopers'). Her
father didn't plot it out or plant very much, she says, but did "intentionally
engage with it", encouraging what it seemed to want to do.
Weaner Cooper had always wanted to focus on native plants in her lawn and do
less mowing, so rewilding their front lawn felt like the right move. But the
Coopers' lawn is a different animal than her father's. It's in full Sun and
consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass – narrow-leaved
grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow
could fully take over. Rather than rip everything up and live with a drab,
brown lawn for months, they decided to try strategically seeding and planting
native plants into the existing turf, hoping it would eventually weed the turf
out naturally.
"It's easier in the sense that you don't need to be beating back as many
weeds," explains Weaner Cooper. "[The native plants] came in so thickly that
[they] outcompeted a lot of the weed pressure that would have been there if we
would have just made it brown."
It took about two years, lots of planning, some careful weeding, and some trial
and error, but eventually a medley of waist-high native plant species blanketed
their vast front lawn.'
Via
Positive.News
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
