Lawn Substitutes

It’s a HOT topic and worthy of as many great photos and links as I can get my eager hands on. Got more? Send ‘em along.

Delawning â€” Theory and Practice

The Great American Delawning Movement is my overview of the subject for a local newspaper. It includes alternatives to lawn â€” meadows, serious veggie patches, woodland gardens, even installing fake turf or decking over the whole yard. Plus ways to make your lawn smaller.
From Lawn Addiction to Anti-Lawn Activism is cribbed almost entirely from Ted Steinberg’s fabulous American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn.
Billy Goodnick makes the case for killing your lawn here. And then helpfully covers HOW to kill and dispose of the right here.
Michael Pollan’s Case Against Lawns
A blogger in the Pacific Northwest tells us all about sheet mulching as a method of lawn removal.

My Own Garden Delawning Story. A tale of two gardens with two different design challenges and alternate plant selection.
My friend Pat Howell designed and exotic, child-friendly front garden.
An artist’s front yard is now a palette for her annual displays of grasses and HUGE sunflowers.
This all-shrub front yard is super-low-maintenance.
A poorly performing lawn was replaced with a front-yard woodland garden.

N. California designer Michelle Derviss shows us a terrific lawn-to-xeriscape project, very minimalist, very cool.
Designer Susan Morrison covers lots of great options for California gardeners in this overview. Want examples? California carexes, creeping thyme, and good-old creeping juniper. Then on her own blog Susan has a whole category called “We don’t need no stinki ng lawn” with lots of stories and photos.
Designer Kelly Marshall makes the case for creating front-yard gardens of California natives.
Front Lawn-to-Garden Makeover by Los Angeles garden designer and TV host Shirley Bovshow..
Extreme Lawn Makeover…Low-Water Plants Take Over! is another Shirley Bovshow design. (Photo right.)
Via Sunset Magazine, an 80-year-old gardener gets rid of her lawn, and wonders why she waited so long.
Amy Stewart fell in love with the lawnless gardens of Mendocino, and we can all see why.

Check out these two lawnless beauties by Pennsylvania native-plant designer Larry Weaner.
A reader near Chicago shows us her gorgeous lawnless front yard, now a cottage garden in its 8th year.
In North Carolina, Joe Lamp’l is awfully impressed with a “wise Master Gardener” who replaced her lawn with Mondo grass. It looks great! The article is called To Mow or Not to Mow.
Gardener Peter Schaar in Dallas shares his lawnless front AND back gardens.
Garden writer and consultant C.L. Fornari went lawnless in her Massachusetts garden.
I love this garden for healing in Buffalo and the Buffalo garden of Jim Chalier. Then Elizabeth discovered this private garden near Buffalo.
Lucinda Hutson’s Austin garden was a big hit with the Gardenblogger Spring Fling bunch. Pam Penick posts more (and better) photos here on her blog.
Speaking of Austin, I’ve seen designer/blogger/photographer Pen Penick’s front-yard garden and it’s awesome. Mainly Texas natives, supplemented with other drought-tolerant beauties.
And speaking of Chicago, how about Millenium Park?