Unlawns: Back-to-nature yardscaping

You see them when you least expect it, while driving down some winding suburban avenue or walking along a city street: houses without lawns.

Instead of those sweeping, highly manicured expanses of green so common in your childhood, you see waving lilies, trailing vines and grass considerably longer than the old 2-inch maximum. It’s a trend that seems to be catching on, both in the Washington area and nationwide.

“Our philosophy is that natural gardens are more beautiful than lawns,” says Alrie Middlebrook, founder and president of Middlebrook Gardens, a California-based company that specializes in ecology-based landscaping.

“Beauty comes from nature,” she says.

Call it lawns gone wild. No tightly manicured greenswards here, but instead, a wide diversity of grass and plantings in a riot of colors and textures that can last well into winter. If you listen to those who are passionate about their black-eyed Susans and meadowsweet, you will find that less lawn can mean major benefits for you and your family.

“There are so many reasons to lose your lawn,” Ms. Middlebrook says, pointing to the ecological, aesthetic, economic and ethical benefits of a back-to-nature lawn.

However, eschewing the traditional lawn can be tough, particularly for those for whom the American lawn has become a sort of icon of success. With more than 58 million home lawns in the United States, the care and feeding of the front lawn has become a multimillion-dollar industry, one that depends on the homeowner’s struggles to raise up the perfect lawn: green, pristine and weed-free.

Still, the ubiquitous lawn as we know it is a fairly recent innovation, dating just to the mass suburbanization of the middle of the last century. It’s not really American, either, considering that most of the species employed in its creation — even the much-vaunted Kentucky bluegrass — are not native to the continent, having evolved instead in the moist, cool climate of Northern Europe.

That’s one reason why the classic lawn is so hard to manage and expensive to maintain. Even crabgrass, the bane of those who love their lawns, was introduced as a forage crop from Europe.

Of course, that hard-to-manage quality has been a boon to lawn care businesses.

“Some people really take it to extremes,” says Charlie Nardozzi, senior horticulturist with the National Gardening Association. “They want an absolute monoculture, a weed-free green lawn.”

But layers of pesticide, weed killer and various fertilizers hardly provide the most salubrious environment for playing children or romping pets.

“It used to be a green lawn was part of the landscape,” Mr. Nardozzi says. “Now it’s a kind of no-man’s land.”

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans spill about 17 million gallons of gasoline every summer in the process of refueling their lawn mowers. That’s 50 percent more oil than arrived on the Alaskan coastline during the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

“Kids can track in herbicides after playing in the grass that can stay on your carpet for two years,” Ms. Middlebrook says. “The chemicals on your lawn can create a very poisonous environment.”

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