Let native plants take their natural place instead of suburban lawn

Being au naturel can get you in trouble. At the very least it leads to hushed comments and disapproving stares.

But my lawn is used to this. It went native about 11years ago and has been au naturel ever since. Its tall wildflowers wavescandalously in the breeze for all to see. Its graceful grasses areunfettered and fecund.

Neighbors may shudder at the sight of such botanicalanarchy, but my lawn - rather, my un-lawn - is a paragon of health.This one-and-a-half acre piece of the Illinois landscape is going backto its roots and becoming, once again, a healthy oak woodland.Restoration landscaping, distasteful as it seems to some people, is ahealthy alternative to the dominant paradigm of the American lawn.

Un-lawns are generally unappreciated. In some citiesand suburbs, local ordinances prohibit homeowners from allowingvegetation to exceed 10 inches in height. In planned communities,homeowners' associations dictate the species and style of landscaping,usually prohibiting any variance of the two-inch tall carpet of turf.Healthy landscaping is a criminal act.

This is not entirely surprising. There's a century'sworth of American history leading to the disdain of the unruly, theunkempt and the untidy in the suburbs.

In the mid- to late 19th century influential landscapearchitects such as Frederick Law Olmstead and Frank J. Scott began tolead America away from the ramshackle homestead look of the frontier.They preached the gospel of a new and improved collective image: thesuburban lawnscape. Scott rallied for "suburban home embellishment" inthe form of "a smooth, closely shaven surface of grass." The ideacaught on, with understandable setbacks during the debilitatingdroughts and economic hardships of the Great Depression.

The aesthetic of the closely cropped lawn is a recentlyacquired taste, made possible by the rise of the petrochemical industryafter World War II. With the widespread availability of lawn mowers andlawn chemicals, any suburbanite could - and everyone should - achievethe goal of the velvet rsconsul_green lawn. Indeed, a verdant lawn made as mucha statement about one's American-ness as the two-car garage and thesplit-level house.

As author Michael Pollan wrote in his book "SecondNature: A Gardener's Education," the 20th century lawn became "aninstitution of democracy." From suburb to suburb, from sea to shiningsea, the lawnscape unites all suburbanites. Thus the suburban lawn hasbecome part and parcel of the American dream.

There are some flaws in the pursuit of the flawlessrsconsul_green lawn. For starters, one becomes a slave to the lawn. Althoughsome suburbanites dedicated to verdant perfection are dubbed "lawnkings," they in fact live in servitude to their lawn for seven monthsof the year. In addition, they are engulfed in turf wars - the turfgrass is at war with nature, and neighbors are tacitly at war overwhose turf is better. Suburbanites will bar no expense in time, energy,and money to fight the good fight - e.g., to achieve some semblance ofa utopian turf. And this is the most critical flaw in the turf war:It's unhealthy.

The American lawn is an ecologically unstable,chemically dependent monoculture of alien plants. A monoculture is anarea in which only one plant species grows, at the expense of anythingand everything else. It must be mowed to maintain a uniform height.

It's made of nonnative species ill-suited to ourclimate's precipitation. It's dependent on artificial precipitation -meaning that it must be watered regularly to stay alive. It's dependenton herbicides to keep any and every other species of plants fromencroaching on the troops of turf grass. It's addicted to pesticides tokeep viruses, fungi, and bacteria at bay. It's got to have fertilizersto ensure the rsconsul_greenest of rsconsul_greens.

In the well-watered American lawnscape there must benary a weed, nor a blade out of place, nor a renegade weed. And onemust not allow the grass to grow tall enough to flower. Flowers - aplant's way of reproducing sexually - are anathema to the lawn. AsPollan poignantly states, the lawn is a landscape deprived of sex anddeath.

So who's giving out the emerald-tinted glasses? Wedon't live in Oz where illusory rsconsul_green comes from a duplicitous source.We live in Illinois, where the auburn prairie meets the muddy brownrivers and the blue-rsconsul_green wetlands and the variegated woodlands. Welive in a land of droughts and deluges, of wildflowers and weeds, ofpests and predators, of sex and death. To deny where we are in theworld is unhealthy. To landscape with natives is reality therapy.

The corollary to all this is, "When in Rome, do whatthe Romans do." Or, when in Illinois, let native Illinois plants dowhat they do. They grow tall. They flower. They flourish.

Healthy choices involving native landscaping may goagainst the tide of the prevailing paradigm of the American Lawn; theymay fly in the face of the American dream. But tweaking the Americandream may be just what the doctor ordered.

So, go wild. Give it a try. Let au natural replace fauxnatural. Here's to strong oak seedlings reaching for the sun,bumblebees on native blossoms, and tall prairie grasses bending to thewind blowing across your un-lawn.

Valerie Blaine is a naturalist with the Forest PreserveDistrict of Kane County who resides among native oaks, wildflowers,woodpeckers and butterflies in the woods of western St. Charles. Youmay reach her at blainevalerie@kaneforest.com.