Cures for the Lawn Ghetto

Mother's Day is the tradtional start of flower-planting season in Kentucky. This year, try thinking beyond the usual annual borders and weeded-and-feeded grass carpets.

How about maintenance-free groundcovers that never need to be mowed? Some have tiny flowers or a pleasant scent.

Instead of annuals you have to drive to the garden center to buy and replant every years, flowering perennials are more expensive up front, but once established keep blooming for years. Check the UK Horticulture Department for ideas.

Or try native wildflowers and wildlife habitat gardens through the Salato Wildlife Center's Native Plant Program, or global-warming-fighting native shrubs and trees.

For great alternative ideas, plant lists, step-by-step instructions and fabulous photos, try the most popular gardening magazine in the country.

The key, and the first step, is to stop thinking of your yard as something that has to be maintained, and start thinking of it as a place to be enjoyed.

In Slate, Tom Vanderbilt writes of suburban "lawn ghettos," starting with a screed against giant multi-colored play equipment but ending with a plea for making lawns a more inviting place for both children and adults to play:

The unused plastic playthings and private playgrounds scattered in the barren yard speak not only to vanishing outdoor play but to a larger cultural disconnect from nature, from one's own environment. But there is a simple solution for this. Instead of buying cheap, potentially toxic plastic water slides and the like, plant a garden. Plant a tree. Plant something. It may not impress your neighbor, but it will last longer, it will look better, and it will have a better effect on the environment than plastic slides.

And there is another benefit. In his book Second Nature, Michael Pollan writes touchingly about a hedge of lilac and forsythia at his childhood home on Long Island, N.Y. To the adult eye, the hedges were simply flush against the fence. But he had his own secret garden, a space between the hedge and the fence. "To a four-year-old, though, the space made by the vaulting branches of a forsythia is as grand as the inside of a cathedral, and there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall." He didn't need a plastic playhouse or an obscene mini-McMansion to find space to play.

The natural world, when it is embraced, not only provides the opportunity for play—I imagine many of you, like me, have fond childhood memories of a swing hanging from a tree, or a tree house, or jumping in leaves, or running through the sprinkler as it watered the tomatoes—but connects us all to something larger and more lasting.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.