Consider the North American lawn. I am not a student of lawns, but the best book I have read—a bracing dip into fresh thinking about gardening—is Second Nature by Michael Pollan (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991). "A lawn," writes Pollan, "is nature under totalitarian rule." Indeed. Driven into submission under the whining mower's blade, drugged into Crayola emerald brightness, lawns are our most spectacularly unproductive crop.
America has an estimated 50,000 square miles of lawn under cultivation, according to The Lawn Institute. Lawns receive 50 to 70 percent of our summer household water use, on average, and are subject to more pesticide and herbicide application than any crop grown in this country. "Lawns are a symptom of, and a metaphor for our skewed -relationship to the land," Pollan writes. "They teach us that with the help of petrochemicals and technology, we can bend nature to our will. Lawns stoke our hubris with regard to the land." No wonder Gerry Wilhelm of Conservation Design Forum calls them a "drug-dependent rug."
What's the alternative? Let's call it re-wilding. Stoking humility instead of hubris by embracing a new aesthetic, that of the natural garden — an aesthetic of more intimate vistas and tall grasses, of moraines and not mountains, of native nature from here in the heartland.
The photos in "The Native Garden Oasis" begin to show a bit of what I mean. Gradually, for a variety of reasons, people all over this region are overthrowing the tyranny of lawns and devoting some or all of their yards to a wilder form of garden. Using native plants that, in the long run, require less care and are supremely suited for our climate, these pioneers are converting some of their sod into vibrant habitats for butterflies and birds. Plots of native plants do a far better job of retaining stormwater runoff than the shallow roots of turfgrass. And gardens of native plants require little or no herbicide and no mowing, thus contributing to air and water quality.
These wilder landscapes demonstrate a generosity of spirit towards the rest of nature and an explicit humility. Here's Pollan again: "Gardening, as compared to lawn care, tutors us in nature's ways, fostering an ethic of give-and-take with respect to the land. Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place. They lessen our dependence on distant sources of energy, technology, food, and, for that matter, interest. For if lawn mowing feels like copying the same sentence over and over, gardening is like writing out new ones, an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery."
Defying the lawn-industrial complex is not easy. Many early patriots have had to overturn highly restrictive "weed ordinances" to permit the return of original plants to their communities! Bret Rappaport of The Wild Ones has provided invaluable legal counsel in this arena. Care must be taken to inform one's neighbors and begin the revolution as graciously as possible. But the rewards are many, and the time has come.
Readers may notice a few graphic changes in this issue. Here, too, we're weeding and planting our words and photos in ways that we hope will make this magazine even more enjoyable and accessible. We welcome new art director Joe Grossmann and his colleagues at g-spot Design and thank Carol Freeman for her years of dedicated service to Chicago Wilderness. Readers will continue to savor her photography here.
