Being Reported to the County Weed Control for my Lawn

Last week, after two garden consults and a presentation on native plants, I came home to a letter in the mail:

I vowed that if I ever received such a letter, I would rip out the lawn and seed in shortgrass prairie -- little bluestem, sideoats grama, and buffalo grass. My best guess is that the guy across the street, who mows 3 times per week, waters religiously, and whose lawn looks artificial, had enough of my mowing 2-4 times a summer and at the highest setting. But it could be anyone. Here's what our lawn looked like before my wife mowed it today (I wanted to hold out until the last possible minute, but she just wanted to get it done):

You can see by the image that, while not being a pristine lawn (I never water or fertilize), it's far from weedy or overgrown. On the edge it grows faster, where neighbor water and nutrient runoff hits my property. There are a few dandelion seed head stalks in the foreground.

Here's the letter I wrote in response to the superintendent:

Lancaster County Weed Control

Attn: Brent Meyer, Superintendent

Work Order: W79922

Dear Mr. Meyer,

Yesterday I received a notice about “weeds and worthless vegetation” on my property. After reviewing the noxious weed list online it is evident that I am not growing purple loosestrife, Canada thistle or any of the others listed; indeed, as a board member of Wachiska Audubon, a prairie conservation group, I would never grow such plants and am well aware of the issues surrounding them and other exotic invasives in our ecosystems.

I would appreciate clarification, pertinent to my property, about what the issue is. If it is the 15-20 dandelions in the lawn, a quick drive through the neighborhood will show many yards have the imported weed currently blooming, including my immediate neighbors; dandelion is an important first nectar source for many early-emerging native bees and other insects that are key to performing essential pollinator services.

If the issue is the length of my lawn, I do routinely stay behind my neighbors in my mowing regime as I work to conserve soil moisture, grow deeper roots, and out compete most weeds organically. I try to keep the front at the 6” ordinance heights, while allowing lawn behind the fence to go much beyond this limit.

My 1,500’ backyard native plant garden has been featured in the Lincoln Journal Star, Omaha World Herald, online at the magazines Fine Gardening and Garden Design, and has been on several local garden tours. In addition, it has been mentioned and linked to on the blog The Buzz at Cherry Creek – a website that explores the evolution of a pollinator garden being established by UNL Extension where your office is located. You can find images and a description of my award-winning garden here: http://deepmiddle.blogspot.com/p/my-garden.html.

I’m sure you are aware of the need to conserve water, maintain higher lawn lengths, and even to mitigate lawns in general from our public and private landscapes as we experience drought boom and bust cycles and shrinking wildlife habitats. I have been thinking about creating large shortgrass prairie beds to replace most of my front lawn – buffalo grass, sideoats grama, and little bluestem. As a part time garden designer working with clients in Omaha and Lincoln, and writing a weekly sustainable garden column at Houzz.com, I’m well aware of the challenges and perceptions such a landscape would have in my suburban community and the need for thoughtful design.

I look forward to hearing back from you on a clarification of this matter.

Best,

Benjamin Vogt

http://monachgard.com

http://thedeepmiddle.com

So, what are your thoughts everyone? Tired of a a culture that promotes the wasting of clean, drinkable water, especially in prairie states prone to drought cycles and water restrictions? What about all the water used and greenhouse gasses produced to create synthetic fertilizers? What about the noise pollution from mowers that causes temporary ear damage? Or about the mower exhaust, many times worse than a car's, that leads to hypertension, lung disease, and low sperm counts?

If you have a tiller bring it on over. We'll only leave a narrow lawn walkway up the middle leading to the backyard, and the rest will be sustainable prairie.

So much for signs educating others and creating positive change.

How Native Plants Can Wake Us To Environmental Action

Gardening is a personal expression. It's "my art." It's a possession. And there's the problem. Aldo Leopold said that our land ethic is messed up because we treat the land as a possession, something that benefits us alone. If we say gardens should have most or all native plants in them, to many people that sounds like a personal dogma forced upon creative free will -- but that interpretation is being filtered through a western culture that puts human self above all else, and especially a concept of "American freedom" that is quite the antithesis to what an ideal democracy actually stands for (i.e. being selfless). 

Just because someone might strongly advocate for all native plant gardens does not limit your aesthetic choices -- in fact, it also expands your ethical ones, connecting you to your family, your children, your children's children, and all other humans and species who are bound together in ways we ignore in every aspect of our privileged lives. We are a navel gazing group, and at the first call of thinking beyond the self we expend more energy denying real freedom than enacting it; that's freedom to have clean air, safe water, a sound agricultural system full of beneficial pollinators, and a secure economy based on all of the above. Native plants in a garden maybe won't save the environment, but they'll get us thinking about when and why the environment needs saving, and how to think in a radical new way to make it happen.

Lookit My Garden

Inside the garden gate

New bed along the deck, sans butterfly bush, opens up the garden.

Looking back toward gate

Insect nirvana -- Prunus virgiana (urinal cake tree)

The Garden is Catching Up

A somewhat late spring, but not bad. Trees are leafing out like crazy. It's been stupidly hot in the 80s. And we've picked up some rain for a change of pace. Here's my boring garden. Oh, April and May are the dullest months of the entire year! Give me July, give me October, give me January -- anything but the vacant glare of spring.

Goodbye, Winter Awesomeness

I have started cutting down the garden and the sadness is unbearable. This was the first year I totally, completely, and head over heals fell in love with the detritus. Truly, the winter garden can be more spectacular than summer's. I think I'm beginning to see summer as either a utilitarian necessity (to help insects) or as cake topped with brownies topped with candy sprinkles topped with pie. No -- the summer garden is the necessary overkill that gets us to the more profound and penetrating echo of winter. The garden succeeds or fails in what it leaves behind. Just as we do.

With the loss of detritus comes the loss of plants that annoy me. I'm ripping out these: 95% of the iris, shasta daisy, giant knapweed (Centaurea macrocephela), Miscanthus 'strictus'. There's never any leaf damage, the number of insects on the flowers is paltry at best. And they aren't native. So I'll make room for some natives I want to experiment with, and I'll also have a crop of seedlings ready to go in June for transplant. More wild quinine, verbena, aster, sedge, liatris, milkweed, etc.

A Garden is an Act Against Nature

Here's the thing -- designing a garden, by its very definition, is an act against nature. A garden manipulates and contorts nature through the filter of our cultural and imaginative biases. These biases change over years and centuries and vary by class, gender, race, etc. But why a gardener (or landscape designer) must then throw up their hands and continue to do whatever they want -- even in the face of mass extinctions, ecosystem eradication, and climate change -- is beyond me. We like things how they are even if they hurt us.

A garden of native plants is at least an attempt to understand what we've altered beyond recognition, and heal the rift between our culture and the culture of flora and fauna around us that have given rise to our evolution -- and given rise to our free will to do whatever we like. A garden focused on exotics is a continual affirmation that we know better, that the planet is here to serve only us, and that we can do no harm; this is a delusion endemic to our species.

Pasque Flower on a Deeper Level

The first prairie flower that blooms in my Nebraska garden is always one that surprises me. I’m not even looking for blooms in early to mid April – instead, I’m counting the plants putting up new bits of green, wondering what’s made it through winter. Pasque flower always makes it, rising in a bulb of fuzz, some sort of thick cleaning pipe pushing it up through leaf litter and last year’s decay. In the afternoon sun the soft, fuzzy hairs around its emerging bud and few thin leaves reflect light like a halo. It is in every possible sense one of my favorite native wildflowers.

 
Pasque flower’s common name is derived from an Old French word for Easter, as it blooms around that time. Pulsatilla patens or Anemone patens – which goes by other common names like prairie crocus, twin flower, and sandflower – is native from Alaska south through Canada and down into Texas, blooming in high Plains elevations and open prairie, most often in dry or rocky soil. It gets about 1’ tall with a 2’ spread and is slow to expand or self sow. From bloom to seed head it easily puts on a full month show that, if you let it, opens your eyes to the garden’s season.

The Native American Dakota people believe that each species of plant and animal has its own song that expresses its life and soul. One translation of the twin flower or pasque flower song is this:

I wish to encourage the children / of other flowering nations now appearing all over the face of the earth; / So while they awaken from sleeping / And come up from the heart of the earth I am standing here old and gray-headed.

Since pasque flower can often begin blooming even before the snow has melted, it is fitting to think of it as old by the time the other spring flowers bloom, especially with its white seed head among the colorful prairie. The hairs along the stems and petals help to create a heat shield around it, much like what happens with the hairs on our arms when we are cold.

The Dakota name of twin flower is evident in this image, where up to 150 yellow stamens surround a tuft of purple pistils. This duality leads to the story of an old Dakota man who sits by the first spring bloom and recounts his life’s joys, sorrows, hopes, and accomplishments. The bloom reminds him of his youth and old age all at once, the perfect circle of life, the duality of existence, and he is encouraged by that guiding principle of completeness and wholeness of beginnings and endings feeding each other. He picks the flower and takes it to his grandchildren to teach them the song he learned as a child.

While I do not have practical experience and make no suggestion that you try anything without consulting a professional, it is said that crushing the fresh leaves and applying on arthritic hands helps ease the pain, but if left on the skin too long will create a blister. Some other medicinal uses include a tincture to calm symptoms of menopause and insomnia, as well as to treat panic attacks.

I find beauty and metaphor in every stage of pasque flower, even as the petals desiccate and fall off to reveal the puffy seeds, which are reminiscent of prairie smoke (Geum triflorum). Native bees, ants, and other early spring pollinators visit with gusto. I wish I had more of these in my garden, entire swaths even – they’ll display far longer than non native crocus, iris reticulata, or tulip, and are very tough, long-lived plants. Knowing their history here in my prairie region makes me love them even more, and I appreciate what they mean in my garden – a small reflection of something much larger.

The Loss of Monarchs is a Loss of Far More

It’s good that we are having a national conversation about monarch butterflies whose overwintering numbers in Mexico have, once again, plummeted. The causes are many, with lack of milkweed habitat in the United States a leading player. But in our emotional responses to the loss of a quintessential summer insect, we’re skimming over a much larger conversation we need to be having – what else is vanishing along with the monarch, and why aren’t we doing anything more profound to preserve and create habitat for native ecosystems like prairie, where milkweed once thrived?

Globally, grasslands are the least protected and most endangered ecosystem. By 2100 the American Great Plains may lose 77% of its once formidable expanse, a region whose rates of loss equal deforestation of rainforests in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Within the Plains environment are countless species of insect, amphibian, mammal, and plant that are severely threatened, from lesser prairie chickens to salt creek tiger beetles to Texas horned lizards to black footed ferrets. The loss of biodiversity is stunning, and as folks like E.O. Wilson and Elizabeth Kolbert state, we may be losing thousands of species each year across the planet – some studies suggest dozens every hour. In fact, Timothy Walker in his book Plant Conservation: Why It Matters and How it Works, suggests that we may lose nearly 30% of our plant species alone by mid century.

 

The issue is not about monarch butterflies, it’s about who we are as a species that has created a world in which we must garden every corner of earth to ensure each species’ existence. As climate change begins to hold sway across our landscapes, one wonders where our ethics rest. Is it ok that the monarchs vanish? What about other species? How much can be lost before the built-in ecological redundancies that have spawned our evolution start to slow our own civilization? Without modern agriculture the planet could only support 30 million humans. We face rising demand in food to the tune of 14% in coming decades, yet we still farm massive monocultures that rely on other monocultures, namely honeybees, to sustain them – 60% of honeybee colonies in the U.S. are needed to pollinate just the almond crop in California. One third of our food comes from pollinating insects, and these insects, commonly native bees that are more efficient pollinators than honeybees, lose their home ground to modern agriculture and suburban sprawl. 

Yet if we planted just a small percentage of fields with native wildflowers and hedgerows, yields would increase, pests would be mitigated as beneficial insect predators move in, and we’d be hitting two birds with one stone – increasing habitat for wildlife and securing our food supply. Studies from Michigan State University regarding blueberry production and the prairie STRIPs program at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture  show a better way to farm that almost eliminates runoff, topsoil loss, and drastically cuts a farmer’s chemical and fuel costs. By supporting native pollinating insects, like any of the 4,000 native bee species, we can also increase seed production and quality.

 

In Homero Aridjis’ call for a milkweed corridor stretching from Mexico to Canada is a larger call for native plantings to stretch alongside the milkweed – plants that support 35 times the caterpillars as exotic species. Suburban gardens, city parks, and roadways should all stop trying to emulate the manicured environment of 19^th century English pastoral design that influenced our largest cultivated crop, lawn, and instead emulate what gave us our nation’s fertile soil in the heartland. We need to stop religiously mowing our parks and highway edges, wasting taxpayer money, emitting greenhouse gases from machines more polluting than most cars, and find ourselves part of the places we say matter to us – our home, our country, our human and animal diversity. 

At the 11^th hour the most recent farm bill had struck from its provisions a mandate for the federal government to keep an annual tab on insect pollinator numbers, which would have forced multiple agencies to address the decline in a group of organisms that provide hundreds of billions of dollars worth of free agricultural services. Combine this with a cut in Conservation Reserve Program funding and increased crop subsidies that encourage plowing up marginal prairie lands, and you have a bona fide recipe for disaster. It stands to reason that if we so easily allow monarchs to vanish we have an ethical crisis on hand. So the question is this: are we willing to plant milkweed and other native insect host and nectar plants for creatures on which most life is based, and are we willing to accept that these organisms are valuable beyond beauty, beyond function, and exist with a purpose as profound, unique, and multifaceted as our own? There’s as much at stake out there in nature, what’s left of it, as there is inside of us. The loss of monarchs is an ethical and even moral hurdle that we must face with a humble determination like that of this iconic butterfly – an insect whose life has spawned art and culture and now a call to live better on this incredible planet.

The Garden Divorce with Sunflower

Gardens do so much for us. They console us, welcome us, connect us. They bring us moments of peace and reflection. They humble. They teach. Unfortunately, we also idealize our gardens (see previous sentences), place them on a pedestal so magnificent they almost seem untouchable and impervious to critique or change. This is a sort of marginalization, the same thing we do when we call nature "mother" and give it inherent or subconscious second class status -- something passive, subservient, or something that's there for us only when we want it.

We need more mindfulness in gardens. We need a sort of Buddhist mentality of practiced displacement so we know our world and place from as many angles as possible -- this tests then confirms or shatters our belief structures and makes us better creatures. I wish gardeners could spend a week sitting by a sunflower observing every insect, every interaction, every rain drop and breeze that effects the plant. If we could see the garden through the eyes of a sunflower, would we become better gardeners? How would our practice change? How would our interaction with flora and fauna, with humans, morph in the coming months and years?

If we could experience the garden through the life in it, I think our gardens might look very different. We'd practice a sort of selfless art, informed by science, literature, art, philosophy, and even religion -- and in turn the garden would reshape those larger areas of knowledge and belief. We'd exercise both sides of our brain and maybe involve a little bit more heart.

A garden is not at any stage an Eden (neither is nature). It is not a place of exclusion or seclusion. A garden is not an idealization of perfection or a perfected idealization. A garden is not for me, but is a nexus of everything I did not understand or realize before I had a garden -- of species, interactions, and methods.

A garden, once created, is a selfless expression of faith. Think of it as a big bang and the ensuing free-forming evolution of life. A garden is created not with self as the centering, ordering property, but as everything else as centering and ordering, like drawing a still life by filling in the shadows first in order to give objects definition (my art teacher in high school taught me this concept).

A garden will never be nature, and it will always be limited by our conception and perception of what nature is in our eye at one moment in time. Just as we evolve, the garden should evolve. A garden is an interpretation, and is as a result as fallible as we are in our knowledge and beliefs, which change through discovery and practice. When I look out my window to the garden I don't see myself as instigator or even creator, in the end I hope to not even see myself -- it is the sunflower turning to face the daylight, pollen in the bloom and nectar along the stem, ants and butterflies and bees and beetles. The sunflower is the instigator and creator. The sunflower is the moment a garden ceases to be a garden and becomes a conduit to freedom from the tyranny of our man-made reality, a reality too often divorced from nature.

Joy Williams On the Morality of Environmental Issues

I teach a book called Ill Nature by Joy Williams to my writing classes. It's unique in that it includes both ranty, in-your-face essays, as well as narrative and ruminative essays; that contrast helps students see two ways of approaching any topic important to them, while making the writing more likely to win folks over. I always suggest that a combination of the two styles might be best.

Regardless, David Gessner once did an interview with Joy, and one of her responses has been a guiding light to me this winter as I work on a new book:

Gessner: Can you discuss the way we marginalize anyone who actually tries to fight for change? And this evolution of the perception of environmentalists as “extremists”? “It is a moral issue,” you write near the end [of her essay "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp"]. As a culture we seem to shy away from the word moral—it seems preacherly. How can we address moral issues when the culture looks down on the word?
 

Williams: I never show my work to anyone. When I’m finished, I just send it off. Whereas my friends could have lovingly mauled it and had complaints and suggestions, I choose to put it immediately in the hands of strangers, possibly fiends. This piece denies rhetorical niceties in that it hectors a you—that is you—for wrecking the Earth with habits and wants. But the you is me, and the they is us. We’re all pretty much responsible for the mess we’re in, some deliberately so, some just in the process of conducting normal somnambulist routines.

Pope John II said that “the environmental crisis is a moral issue.” I’m not sure what the new Pope has said on the subject. He’s recently closed limbo, which is where most environmental statutes end up.

I think destroying the Earth and its creatures—our mute fellow travelers—is sinful. If the word retains any meaning at all, it should be applied to the wanton acts we accept and tolerate daily.

A Plethora of My Articles and Posts

I've been working on my gardening resume, some spring cleaning, and came up with a group of selected links to pieces I've written at both Houzz and Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens. Personally, I find this all much more interesting than seeing which high-priced actor won what award while wearing what dress that exposes what percentage of skin. If I want glitz and glamor I'll garden in moonlight under a mirror ball.

HOUZZ ARTICLES

Gardening for Bees, and Why It’s a Good Thing

6 Reasons I’m Not Looking Forward to Spring

Meet a Lawn Alternative That Works Wonders (Sedge)

Be a Butterfly Savior – Garden for Monarchs

13 Risks to Take for True Garden Rewards

10 Native Wildflowers to Beautify Your Winter Garden

How I Learned to Be an Imperfect Gardener

7 Reasons Not to Clean Up Your Fall Garden

Autumn Joy: How to Get 3 Months of Fall Flowers (Native Asters)

5 Unsung Wildflowers That Thrive in Dry Shade

The Case for Losing the Traditional Lawn

6 Plants That Beat Butterfly Bush for the Wildlife Draw

Be Your Own Wildflower Nursery

3 Ways Native Plants Make Gardening So Much Better

NATIVE PLANTS & WILDLIFE GARDENS POSTS

What the Last Prairies Teach Us About 21^st Century Gardening

Fall is For Real Gardening and Habitat Maintenance

A Helping Hand (A Swallowtail’s Last Eggs)

Today is the First Day of a New Way of Thinking

Send a Message, Start Digging

Can’t Have Enough (Native Plants)

Gardening for the Future

The Thin Green Line

Winter Interest Shminterest

For Amber Waves of Bluestem

Mr. Mows All the Time