Shrinking the lawn means low mow maintenance

Marjorie’s father, Floyd, now in his 80s and less interested in mowing a wide expanse of lawn every weekend of summer, wants to replace a portion of his back lawn in western Massachusetts with something else, something that requires far less maintenance. He is not alone. Many parents of baby boomers join Floyd in wanting to shrink the size of their lawns, desiring less in the way of work and more in the way of intellectual stimulation from their gardens.

Baby boomers are also growing weary of large lawns as we become aware of the environmental stress caused by the chemicals used in keeping turf pest free and green. We realize that there are low-maintenance alternatives that are both attractive and stimulating.

If you want to shrink your lawn, the first step is to decide how much lawn you actually need. Room for a croquet or badminton court, or just enough for that favorite lawn chair? None at all for me, thank you. I much prefer to trod over steppingstones as I wander about a garden filled with taller plants and pollinators, smelling flowers, touching bark and pulling weeds. Grass is good for walkways through the garden and little else.

The job may be more than you want to tackle in one year. If so, you can shrink the lawn gradually, tackling a section of the yard each year. This is the road that Floyd is on, picking a sloping section of the back yard that borders the neighbors’ lawn as his target for next year.

So the first thing Floyd did was contact a local landscape contractor for advice and a quote. The advice: Replace the turf with periwinkle (Vinca minor), a creeping groundcover. The quote: more than $2,500.

When Floyd told us about the contractor’s idea, my first thought was that if indeed there was something more banal, more boring, than a wide expanse of turf grass, it would be a wide expanse of turf grass bordered by a wide expanse of periwinkle. Certainly it would require less maintenance, since periwinkle does not need to be mowed, but for that kind of money I would have expected something more creative and more stimulating, an outdoor room in which Floyd could spend time as caretaker and learner.

Let me offer an example. Marjorie and I recently dug up the turf areas that bordered both sides of the steps rising from the driveway up to the house, replacing the grass with several Northern bush honeysuckles (Diervilla lonicera). This native shrub has a suckering habit and eventually will colonize the areas, protecting against soil erosion as effectively as the turf but with far more landscape interest. The bright yellow flowers that cover its arching stems will brighten our early summer mornings and bring bumblebees to our doorstep. Autumn leaves in shades of deep red, orange and yellow will greet October visitors as they make the climb.

Marjorie told her dad to forget the contractor; we will give that section of his lawn a makeover in the spring. We are thinking about all the native ferns that could be used, about Diervilla and the low-growing kalmia (Kalmia angustifolia) and bunchberry (Cornus canadensis); about half-buried granite rocks. And steppingstones.

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