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Writer's pictureMaggie Favretti

Could Your Yard be a Pollinator Paradise?

From Lawns to Meadows: heal our watershed and reverse climate change

Dr. Z. Grabowski

Associate Director, Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed

From Lawns to Meadows: heal our watershed and reverse climate change


No time to read? Key takeaway: eliminating lawns where possible can improve our health, increase food security, support biodiversity, create healthier jobs, reduce flooding, improve water quality and fisheries, and reverse climate change.


We know that biodiversity, from the microbes essential to our digestion and immune function, to the megafauna that inspire us, is vital for human health and well being. And yet, our practices of landscaping do not reflect this understanding. Nowhere is our antagonistic relationship with the earth more visible in the lawn. And it is in the lawn, that some of our biggest opportunities to support flourishing ecosystems can be found.


Lawns, or closely mown, predominantly mono-culture, grasslands occupy almost 30% of the American landscape, dominating green-space in residential and built up areas. Maintaining the aesthetic of a deep green consistent grass cover requires significant inputs of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides and considerable fuel and time for mowing. If you are a lawn lover, or need to maintain spaces to gather and play, keep reading to learn about how to protect yourself and your loved ones while also maintaining healthy short grass where it is needed. Have lawn to spare? We will walk you through why you will feel good converting it to a beautiful, biodiverse, and bountiful landscape. Do you have other concerns? We’d love to hear from you.


The Problem: The unconscious adoption of lawn is an unhealthy relationship harming our health, our water, changing our climate, and increasing our flood risk

Lawn chemicals are directly responsible for impairments to surface and groundwater. They are also directly responsible for the proliferation of algal blooms causing many health problems while harming aquatic ecosystems and destroying economically vital fisheries. Aside from these systemic impacts, lawn ‘care’ chemicals also harm lawn care workers, as many are directly linked to cancer, neurological diseases, and reproductive harm. They also harm the health of those who spend time on lawns, a disconnect between the advertised aesthetic of pets, children, and babies frolicking in the short grass and their negative impacts on human and ecological health.


Lawns are also one of the single biggest household contributors to climate change, as mowers use a tremendous amount of fossil fuels to operate and transport. Combined with the climate impacts of producing and using fertilizers, maintaining lawns is now understood to be one of the largest easily preventable impacts on global climate change, and could be an essential piece of the suite of solutions to draw green house gasses out of the atmosphere. The dust generated during lawn mowing, often laden with herbicide, fertilizer, and pesticide residues, is also toxic, further reducing air quality alongside the exhaust from mowers. Constant removal of grass clippings and leaves from lawns, combined with mowing, turns grassy areas into impervious surfaces, contributing to flash flooding and turning a potential nutrient and carbon sink into a source of climate changing emissions and water pollution. 


Given all these downsides of lawns why are they so prevalent across the American (and global) landscape? Paul Robbins et al.’s ground breaking work on ‘Lawn People’ examined this question and found that most people are somewhat aware of the downsides of the lawn, and yet feel compelled to be good neighbors in support of a unified aesthetic that embodies a sense of community care and responsibility. This strikes me as a deep paradox - we destroy life around us and poison ourselves, our community, and our planet because we care? Could we not embody care with flourishing wildflower meadows?


The Benefits: our health, kinship, clean water, and a cooler climate

The benefits of biodiverse meadows and landscapes are many. Childhood exposure to a diverse microbiome supported by plant, insect, and animal diversity almost eliminates seasonal allergies later in life, heightens immune function and resistance to disease, and appears to significantly reduce risks for many auto-immune conditions and chronic inflammation issues. Aside from eliminating the toxic chemical risk associated with lawns, wildflower meadows literally (biophysically) improve our health. The resonant vibrations of bees and the many other pollinators, along with the songs of meadow birds all have a direct and positive impact on our psychological health. The sights and smells of wildflower meadows further soothe our senses, boosting brain serotonin (the happiness hormone) and reducing cortisol (the stress hormone). Tending to and gathering edible and medicinal plants found in wildflower meadows, improves our connections with nature, stimulating our nurturing instincts, and provides us with many beneficial compounds and minerals. Creating low maintenance edible landscapes further boosts our physical and mental well being, similar to the benefits of gardening.


The Solution: ecological lawn care, wildflower meadows, and edible landscapes

Growing up I loved playing soccer, and spending a lot of time up close and personal with turf. It’s hard not to notice that fields that weren’t chemically managed have an inherent diversity, clovers, plantains, and different grasses, none of which seem to negatively impact the feel and texture of playing on them. If closely cropped grass is necessary, it’s more than possible to achieve it in a way that still builds soil health, has some diversity, and doesn’t require intensive chemical inputs. Using compost and mowing clippings and leaves into the lawn builds soil and sequesters some carbon, improving the soils ability to absorb rainfall and reduce downstream flood risk. While this requires a departure from the marketed aesthetic of deep green lawns with identical blades of grass, you can create safe and healthy places to play for your family and pets without chemicals.


If you aren’t using your lawn for play or leisure, converting it to a wildflower meadow can be as easy as simply reducing your mowing regime. To foster particular wildflowers, you can also scarify the soil and build a wildflower seedbank, with American Meadows offering different regional seed mixes alongside other companies like Vermont Wildflower farm - you can also gather seeds from other neighborhood meadows by hand and cast them into your desired space. For quick establishment, you can also buy plugs (smalls seedlings) of perennial flowers from local garden supply companies, like the Mystic River Watershed's very own Stonington Gardens and direct plant them into your new meadow.


Instead of mowing weekly or biweekly, one can cut the little-used portions of a lawn once or twice a year, or even every other year, to keep herbaceous flowering plants dominant while building soil, eliminating fertilizer and pesticide use, and supporting biodiversity, as recommended by American Meadows. The strategies for turning your meadow into pollinator rich habitat will vary a bit based upon your existing conditions, but overall they are pretty straightforward. To be able to enjoy it and maintain use of your yard, you can also mow paths (I hand cut mine with a scythe from Scythe Supply) weekly or biweekly depending on how quickly things are growing, to places of gathering and function (like the firepit, compost pile, herb and vegetable gardens). All that is really needed is a desire to act as a regenerative agent alongside your plant, animal, fungi, microbe, and insect kin and promote life in your landscape rather than seeking to control it through violent means.


Using lawns as rotational grazing habitat for cows, chickens, horses, sheep, goats, or alpacas, or as a source of hay, eliminates the need for most cutting once the desired perennial plant assemblage is stabilized, and can serve as an essential part of regenerating our regional food systems and agro-ecology as is being done in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Creating low maintenance edible landscapes, like Masonobu Fukuoka’s ‘Wild Gardening’ - the Japanese version of our Pequot Allies agro-forestry techniques - are now  seeing a resurgence of interest and funding in our region, like in Maine and New Hampshire with many of our Native plants being suitable for forage and landscaping. Growing awareness of and expanding the practic of Native agro-forestry with our Indigenous allies is a key part of our Watershed Alliance’s mission.


Overcoming the Fears: ticks, disease, and fire risks

While many may fear ticks that come with having tall grasses and vegetation around the home, keeping paths and walkways clear significantly reduces this risk, harboring increased biodiversity has been shown to reduce tick and Lyme prevalence and biological controls on tick populations are increasingly utilized with pathogenic fungi already approved for use. And while there is increasing scientific consensus that the Indigenous practice of seasonal burning being can be highly effective for tick reduction - reintroducing fire into our landscapes as was practiced since time immemorial will require an even broader paradigm shift than we can cover in this one blog entry. Let us just say for now that it is being actively explored by a new federal initiative, and we will return to the topic. As wildfire and disease risks continue to increase due to climate change, it is even more important that we make our landscapes part of the solution.


For a complete workshop on how to get this done, and to meet others interested in turning lawns into meadows, we recommend: Connecticut College's SALT Conference, Nov. 2.

It is already so popular that they've had to move it into a larger venue. Don't wait to register!




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