Jeez, I just noticed it’s been over a week since I’ve posted here – bad blogger!  Well, my article in Fine Gardening finally arrived, so here’s a teaser photo.

In the article, I cover a bunch of options for replacing turfgrass with similar-but-easier short groundcovers.  Like?  Thyme, mazus, creeping Jenny (where it can be contained), dwarf cinquefoil, Sedum acre, and good old Dutch white clover.

I posted an overview of the backyard transformation to Sedum acre and clover here, with before, during and after shots, and wide views from the deck.  And on the right is another view of the same garden, just how it’ll look in a couple of months when 3 feet of snow is a distant memory.  Cannot come soon enough.

Simone Fary lives just 3 blocks from the newly-bustling downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, with its shops, night life and subway station to greater DC.  So, a great location.  Plus plenty of sun, y'all!  But like every other front yard in the neighborhood, hers was devoted to the care and feeding of turfgrass and some foundation shrubs.  That bit of conformity ended when Simone got the urge to grow some food, dammit, but to grow it in a gorgeous, gardeny way.  No need to go whole-farm and get the neighbors all nervous about property values.   No need to deny herself a beautiful garden.  The gardener with sun can have everything!

There's no real plan or formula for mixing edibles with ornamentals, just lots of experimentation.  Lots of gardening.  (Get that?  It's not what you'd call low-maintenance, and it isn't intended to be.) Here are the plants that have done well for Simone in her sunny city lot.

Fruits and vegetables
Highbush blueberry, Egyptian walking onions, Calendula, Egyptian spinach (self-seeding), Peas, Purple bush and pole beans against the fence, Chard, 'Hard neck' garlic she plants in October, Collonade apple (of which the squirrels eat ALL), Red currents (very pretty in the spring),  Pepper, Pawpaws (which are fly-pollinated, so Simone does that by hand with a paintbrush, Asian persimmons.

Herbs
Rosemary, Thyme, Oregano, Pineapple sage, Chives (blossoms are great on salads), Bronze fennel, Sorrel, and Dill (gorgeous the day I visited in late summer).

Strictly ornamental or for wildlife
Sunflower, Purple sage (or its looks, not for cooking),  Creeping phlox, Sedum, Asters, Dayliles (though you can eat daylily flowers), Mums, Lamb's ear, Ajuga, Liatris, Monarda (though flower petals can be used in salads), Hydrangea, Sunberries (for foliage only – because the bugs eat the fruit).

What she does not recommend

• Passionflower or purple coneflower because they seed too freely.
• Strawberry also reseeded too freely, and they're great in jellies and syrup.  So, maybe in hanging baskets.
• Nanking bush cherry – little red lines, tart.  Simone says it takes up too much space for what it yields.  

Garden writer Julie Shapiro, whose 1/4-acre garden is in Hull, MA along the Boston Harbor, sent me these photos of her "eco-lawn", and the story behind it. That interesting tale includes far more than lawn, though.  Her 1885 house has a colorful history that includes lobster boats being stored alongside it, so Julie's first job on the site was to get rid of some asphalt and lots of soil filled with metal lobster trap shards, glass and other sharp dangerous things. But because her land is in a A1 flood plain – meaning an area of special flood hazard – "care had to be given to the plant material and lawn, if there was to be any."

That official status meant that Julie had to go before the town's Conservation Committee with copious amounts of documentation from all sorts of agencies about her plans for the yard, including exactly how many times her new peastones had been washed.  New surfaces needed to be permeable.  Even her new 200-square-foot lawn-type area had to be spec'ed and approved – and that's where we pick up the story of her eco-lawn.

My research on what to do with the "lawn" brought me to the developing of an ecolawn or biolawn, an ecologicaly-based area (consisting of plants suitable for the region we live in, and are both drought and shade tolerant, don’t thatch, as grass does, and is attractive to look at, doing away with constant “mowing, spraying , fertilizing and watering, thereby conserving water and energy, protecting the soils surface, and  having a lovely and safe alternative to “a patch of green”.

This is what we proposed to the Conservation Committee, and after receiving our positive declaration proceeded to hand sow a mix of Colonial Bentgrass (Agrostis tenuis), Strawberry clover (Trifolium fragiferum) and Dutch White Clover (T. repens), Wild English Daisies (Bellis perennis), Roman Chamomile (Anthemus nobilis), Yarrow (Achillea millifolium), and Baby Blue Eyes (Nemophila menziesii), low-growing thyme, and small spring ephemeral bulbs.

These photos are of our lawn. We are proud of it, have to mow it with our reel mower very rarely, and it blooms, feeds itself, and has become a comfort for our feet and a comfort to us.  We did this right and we are happy with all the work and effort we put in to doing it right.

At the 11-year mark, the annual clover, leaving bare patches, has me on the move to decide what to reseed in its place. I do reseed with clover and chamomile every other year, but I would like more thyme. It seems the thyme grows well and lives happily in these reclaimed spots, as a hermit crab would in retaking another's space.

That is our story and we're sticking to it.

Thanks, Julie!

Toby Riley in Northeastern Florida wrote to the Lawn Reform Coalition to tell us:

In 1998 I replaced  my St Augustine grass with stone and mulch and crape myrtles etc  – best move I ever made and it has paid for  it'self  many times over.  Please sign me up as a supporter.  Toby Riley. 

So asked what was there before and he answered:

There was only a strip of grass along the front of the lot, about 30' by 210'.  We saved most of the original trees.  The grass was replaced in 1998 with native shrubs, ground cover, crushed stone and the crape myrtles.  This year I am adding a vegetable garden since the front yard gets the most sun. 

No yard maintenance costs, no fertilizer and very little water used.  I have been repaid several times over.  Please send it all over the country and we are glad to offer tours to anyone passing by in NE Florida.

Great transformation there, Toby, and thanks for sharing it.

Nine of us garden designer/writer/rabble-rowser types have been conspiring for a while now to come up with a way to bring attention to the problems with the American Lawn as we know it, but even more so on all the solutions we have to choose from – better lawn types, organic, low-water lawn care, and alternatives to lawn altogether.  Because you know where the public is always sent for gardening help, right?  Those Extension Service websites.  Well, most of them are still telling us to "green up" the lawn in the spring, water a inch every week throughout the summer, and kill that awful clover.  Yep, the need for information about better choices is clear.

So we pitched in a hundred bucks each, hired a designer, and put together what we hope will be an inspiring website.  A little more scheming resulted in a Facebook page, a Flickr group, and printable materials for other lawn reformersr to use locally. 

And today’s our big coming out party!!  So mosey on over to LawnReform.org and look around.  It’s just a start, and puh-leeze send me your suggestions for books, articles online, success stories about overturning laws and rules that mandate perfect, green lawn, etc.  And spread our link – especially to the Resources page – because right now people looking for help online are finding pretty much nothing. Seriously, I Googled "lawn replacement" and found a website that was nothing but stolen content, including my own.  (We reported that sucker to their server and got the site taken down stat.)  But soon, people looking for help with find it, and they just  might make some changes.

WIN THE AMERICAN MEADOW LAWN BOOK
John Greenlee is a pioneer in the use of sustainable plants as lawn alternatives, many of them regionally native, and he’s teamed up with the fabulous photographer Saxon Holt and Timber Press to create what we can safely assume is a gorgeous and informative book about meadows.  To be eligible to win a copy, write a blog post or blog comment on this subject: "I used to have a lawn but now I have____________."  Coalition member Susan Morrison is in charge and has all the details on her blog. THIS JUST IN:  Greenlee and Timber have a trailer for the book on YouTube.

ON PARTERSHIPS
I love ‘em (obviously) and the Lawn Reform bunch is awesome.  And about websites, you know I love them because I have so damn many and I have enough now, thank you.

If you’ve followed the links on my WowOWow.com article - "Coming soon: The Death of the Great American Lawn" – welcome and look around.  For more articles about lawn, check out the categories "Lawn" and "Lawn Substitutes" over in the right.

Then on my website there’s a whole section called Lawn Reduction and Lawn Substitutes, with examples from across the U.S.

Next up from me on WowOWow I’ll be blogging about solutions – better lawn species, better ways to care for lawn, and alternatives to lawn altogether – and where to find them.  And where to find them will be a new website that’’s launching next month.  It’s the combined effort of Paul Tukey, Ginny Stibolt, Susan Morrison, Tom Christopher, Evelyn Hadden, Billy Goodnick, Shirley Bovshow, a movie producer/environmental activist named Tom Engelman, and yours truly.  

Photo and plant credits, clockwise from upper left: Prairie Dropseed at the Scott Arboretum by Susan Harris; Sedum acre and Dutch white clover by Susan Harris; UC Verde Buffalo grass by Tom Hawkins; and Carex pansa by Owen Dell.