My mother has a wild lawn, dominated by ferns, moss, wildflowers and other nifty things. This replaced the previous owner’s typically sterile American lawn. When she first moved in a few decades ago there wasn’t much in the way of wildlife. Now she has deer wandering around, rabbits, turkeys, frogs, snakes, hawks, and more bees than you can shake a stick at.

I really believe that one relatively simple and cosmetic personal choices we make can have a huge impact on our local environment, and by extension the broader one.

Deer and hawks may visit a place because it now is different, but anything people normally call "lawn" is irrelevant in size as the habitat of wild mammals or large birds. I hardly think the impact is "huge" for the environment, though it may be very nice for the person observing nature from his home (yes, I see deer and rabbits very regularly, even if I have just a lawn, but there's some actual forest starting next to my plot. Neighbourhood got scared because someone spotted a wolf.)

Lawns are the dumbest thing Americans obsess over. I've lived in apartments my whole adult life but if I had a lawn I'd be inclined to just let it go wild. Or maybe plant moss or something.

Unfortunately, just like with municipal support of car culture, lawns and their upkeep are often written into municipal bylaws. That's not even getting into HOAs and how restrictive their lawn policies can be - often having requirements down to which species of grass[1] you're allowed to use. Finally there's communal pressure from neighbours, who will give you the stink eye if the weeds from your wild lawn even might encroach onto their manicured grass.

[1] https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/real-estate-and-landlordin...

I just bought my first home last spring. No HOA, but I did get the city called on me for being close to the 8 inch limit on grass. We also heard on the grape vine that one neighbor blamed our longer grass for the mosquitoes keeping them from enjoying the outdoors, instead of, you know, the record rainfall and nearby drainage ditch.

Luckily my city's ordinances have a provision for a "natural lawn" made up of native grasses and plants that can be extra tall. I intend to turn my front yard into one to reduce how much mowing I need to do.

> for being close to the 8 inch limit on grass.

What the hell?

I assume simply concreting over it for more parking space would be fine though.

Most UK streets will have a property or two where the garden does whatever it is that gardens do when completely ignored for a decade. Or with meadow or wildlife friendly planting, maybe intentionally including weeds.

I love this. All over HN American folks talk now and then about how govt should keep out of things, and how that works so much better than in that terrible interfering socialist place, Europe. You regulate your front lawns and grass height. There's probably an ANSI standard for them. Sorry. ;)

And then your neighborhood association would fine you or try to make your life a living hell until you fell into line and mowed it like a good boy. For people that love to obsess over their own lawns they REALLY love to obsess over their neighbor's lawns.

In my hippy puget sound part of the world, we just mow to keep the grass short but otherwise let it do whatever, usually turn brown and be filled with moss and clover. We started to aerate because that helps runoff.

That works fine in the Pacific Northwest. In the South, after six months, your entire yard will be an impassable jungle filled with mosquitos, cockroaches, rats, etc.

It's much easier to tame a yard in a climate that's cold half the year and dark 3/4 of it.

I live in the Inland Northwest, and I assure you what you mention is true. We have a forest, but generally the ground is brown and dry in summer, and the winters are long and hard. The Cascades are huge, and create an extensive rain shadow.

Seattle sits right next to the only temperate rainforest in the world, though. The sheer amount of plant life there is something to behold, and it doesn't get cold there all that long.

> Seattle sits right next to the only temperate rainforest in the world, though

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_rainforest

You might be interested in the section "Global distribution".

The rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula is beautiful and rich with plant life, but the South is a different beast. If you take an empty lot in the South and wait a year, it will be packed with growing things, sprawling and reaching toward the sun. The rate of growth is just insane.

So, a thriving insect ecosystem? Isn't that... the point?

What if you mow it short regularly?

We would have the same mess if we didn't mow. Things grow like crazy for six months here

In Seattle, I mow the lawn every two weeks for about six months of the year. When I lived in Florida, if I didn't mow at least once a week, almost all year, I would very quickly get a lawn too thick for my lawnmower to get through. The Gulf Coast is always waiting for a moment's inattention to revert back to the jungle that it desperately wants to be.

Dark 1/2 the year, our equinox is the same day as Alabama.

You'd better make sure you move into a neighborhood that already has wild lawns in it, otherwise you'll be in for some headaches from busy body neighbors.

Or just choose an neighborhood without an HOA.

This seems bogus to me. There are many more acres of agricultural land vs lawns. Without looking it up I would guess agricultural land accounts for over 90% of the herbicide and pesticide use. We are not going to save the environment by having tiny patches of chemical-free land while huge swaths outside the cities are being doused.

>"Homes, golf courses and parks may grow more acres of turf grass than U.S. farmers devote to corn, wheat and fruit trees — combined [..] 2005, researchers estimated there are 40 million acres of turf grass in the U.S., covering 1.9 percent of the land." - https://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-contin...

>357,023,500 acres of cropland in the United States. - https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/land...

40 million acres for lawns in the US (2005), 357 million acres of land for crops (2007). However it is very surprising that we use significantly more land for lawns than for corn.

Corn is only one crop, and it has incredibly high caloric yields per acre (Much higher then grains, greens, vegetables). It is second only to potatoes in calories/acre.

> I’ve made the same basic comment before, but we need to ban the residential use of herbicides and pesticides.

This reminds me of a thread in my local suburban community's Facebook group. Someone was complaining about his dog repeatedly eating some small mushrooms growing in the backyard of his newly bought home and getting sick. The backyard was wildish, had flowers and some patches of tall grass, rocks etc... It actually looked pretty good. The whole thread was about herbicide recommendations. He ended up killing most of his vegetation and finally decided on 'installing' a lawn. A sterile all-American golfcourse-like green. All so that his dog can no longer eat mushrooms. Fucking idiots.

I'd support this, though I do consider myself a responsible herbicide user. I use only spot application of glyphosate (on dry, sunny days) to help tackle invasive species, or to prepare lawn for conversion to native prairie instead.

Where I see the big problem is the standard practice of treating entire lawns with fertilizer and pesticide mixes. It's such a strange practice to me.

> We need to allow people to have native plant yards. I've seen great results with insects. Unfortunately it's illegal where I live

Illegal!? Seriously??

I don’t know of any places where native lawns are actually against the law, but the parent might mean “against the terms of the HOA”, which is effectively the same thing since HOAs can levy fines and in some cases evict you if you don’t follow the rules. Most HOAs have strict policies stating that you must have the kind of perfect all-American lawn that is at issue here... just one more reason why they should all be destroyed.

There are definitely city ordinances which would prohibit it, but there are often workarounds and loopholes involving landscaping (like adding a retaining wall along the sidewalk, or maintaining a small strip of grass adjascent to city property).