I killed my lawn. I didn’t mean to. The experience unfolded naturally. Ed and I inherited the lawn when we bought the house. At first, we watered and mowed. But then I had a sickening realization: After every mowing, the lawn grew back. This wasn’t like gardens that produce food and beauty. This was a meaningless cycle of work. We have nearly an acre. I mulled over the wisdom of spending money to water grass just to continually mow it. I cut off the sprinkler system. This is apparently a bad idea here in Central Texas. Grass dies.

 I gave the situation a lot of thought. All my neighbors had lawns. Heck, more than 80 percent of Americans have lawns. Is everyone else happily mowing their squares of green, utilizing weed killers and fertilizers, and keeping a constant spray of water going? I had mixed feelings. I had fond memories from my childhood of rolling around in the grass, doing cartwheels and handstands, careening down the Slip ’N Slide, and playing baseball with the neighborhood gang. Lawns were fun. And I liked all that green.

I wasn’t against having a lawn, but the costs to maintain it were so high. Our water bill dropped by fifty dollars a month after I turned off the sprinkler system. Gasoline for the mower doesn’t cost much, but I wondered about emissions and how much water we were siphoning from the aquifers.

I thought I’d find a middle ground. For weeks on end, I ignored my lawn. I turned on the sprinkler system intermittently and pulled out the mower about six times a year. I flat-out refused chemicals. I didn’t know much about the damage they do, but I figured if I didn’t use them, I wasn’t hurting anything. I did attempt to reseed the yard. I scraped soil, poked holes in the ground, put down compost, scattered seeds, and gently watered. I thrilled when tiny blades of grass appeared. And then, heavy rains washed them all away. Every time. It was not easy to grow grass.

The grass thinned. Other plants moved in. At first I delighted in the variety of leaf shapes and tiny flowers. I wanted to know the names of all the newly arrived plants. I found some of them—in both a weed database and in my wildflower books. Upon hearing my circumstances, a friend said, “May all your weeds be wildflowers.” I held on to that like a mantra. I learned, however, that many volunteers would suddenly grow large, like something in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They’d throw out shoots, sprawl across the grass, set seed, and then die. The once-pretty weed flowers became huge and ugly. They overtook everything. I yanked them out of the ground. If a plant wasn’t grass, it went.

I created bald spots. At first, I saw this as an opportunity to add gardens. I wanted to create a beautiful, private paradise and invite friends in. Guests came: Butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds soon found our gardens. Songbirds arrived at our feeders, and wildlife strolled about our yard. Deer chomped on our flowers. I learned which plants were drought tolerant so I could keep water usage low. But the grass kept dying, even when I tended to it. I really didn’t want to destroy it. The continuous expanse of green was a visual base, a connecting element to the tangled, color-filled messes of my gardens. I looked into ground cover. I browsed garden books that offered lawn alternatives. I’d swoon over the photographs, look up the plant names, and then my heart would sink. All the beautiful photos were taken in milder climates. Nothing I found would grow here. I was frustrated.

I also understood that the prevailing attitude in suburbia—and perhaps even in the rural subdivision where I live—is that lush, crew-cut lawns are proper and good. People get crazed about their lawns. Homeowners’ associations and local governments mandate them. It can feel cultish. The love of lawns seems to go beyond aesthetics. A well-kept lawn is somehow a sign that one is an upstanding citizen. Grass isn’t just grass. And a yard of unmowed non-grasses might indicate laziness, sloth, a bad seed. I knew what was expected of me. But my notions of good citizenry and aesthetics diverge from popular opinion on this count. I think messiness is okay. Mother Nature is not a neat freak. Trees drop their leaves indiscriminately, forests are a wondrous jumble of plant life, and the wind strews things about in a heartbeat.

Economics and peer pressure loomed, though. Ed and I planned to sell the house one day. Would the buyers expect a pristine sheet of Bermuda grass? Did I have to hurt the environment to sell a house? I felt like I was in a parable, fighting dark forces. But which was the dark force? Weeds? Lawns? A misguided populace? Everyone here has a sprinkler system. We’re using up water to grow something that is cut, bagged, and discarded.  What are we doing? Why are lawns such a ubiquitous—even mandated—aesthetic?

I wondered about the history of lawns. What I understood about their beginnings was that because of industrialization, cities became desperate places, and parks were designed as one of the ways to improve city life. From there, communities cropped up where each home had its own slice of nature. This all seemed like a pretty innocent idea. But something went haywire.

I thought the whole thing over. Then I called my mom. She had a lawn, after all. She lived in a temperate climate. “Ma,” I said. “Do you ever water your lawn?” She scoffed. How could her daughter come up with such a crazy notion? Her answer was no. Why would she water her lawn? In some places, lawns don’t require watering. In other places, like where I live, they don’t make sense. Not all climates support lawns. Now, I really like the idea that each of us could have our own outdoor sanctuary. But where did this expectation of a grassy lawn come from? I cracked open some books.

Here’s what I learned: There was a time when lawns were not ubiquitous or required. Lawns started carpeting the nation in the 1950s, right after World War II. It was a time of looking to the future with hope and idealism. It was also an era of conformity, an era plagued by the fear of communism. So we had hope, fear, and lawns. We also had the rise of advertising, which not only encouraged people to have lawns and to buy lawn products, but also gave meaning to those products. The Scott Company sold grass seed and the dream of upward mobility. The Levitts, developers of vast suburban areas, sold the idea of who we might be with a lawn. As Ted Steinberg notes in American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, Abraham Levitt said, “A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors, as desirable citizens”; his son William said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.”

So people did grow lawns for aesthetics, sports, and barbecues, but grass lawns also became aligned with the ideology of the times. And so this vastly simplified plant, grass, got all entwined and confused with being a good person, hope for the future, and staying in line socially and politically.

After this, I had a better understanding of why people felt so strongly about lawns. Of course, I didn’t think anyone was eyeing their neighbor’s dandelions and fearing a communist invasion. But this history isn’t encapsulated in the distant past. It affects how we live now. We’re living with the legacy and influence of advertisements broadcast into our society seventy years ago. And the purpose of those advertisements was to get us to buy things. We were duped.

I still think we should try for mini-utopias. But what if we create them without finicky introduced grasses? We could build our havens with plants better adapted to local conditions, ones that can actually survive. I’ve met a few people who went “no mow,” created natural habitats, and practiced xeriscaping—the practice of designing landscapes to keep water needs to a minimum. Fights sometimes ensued with the lawn-abiding folks, but not always. A lot of people were surprised and impressed by alternative lawns.

I wished I could figure out my own alternative. The more I fought my yard, the less sense it made. In the summer, temperatures here hit one hundred degrees or more for weeks or months. We routinely have droughts and burn bans. One day, as luck would have it, my sprinkler system died. I couldn’t find anyone to repair it. I bought a little sprinkler and tried hand watering, to no avail. But what was I thinking? Even if we stay within water restriction guidelines, we still have a problem. In 2022, during the drought, levels in our water towers dropped so low that the water company issued a boil order. We used so much water—including on our lawns—that the remaining water was unsafe to drink. Is this a sign of an intelligent civilization? I pondered my dead grass and boiled water. I had no answer to my quandary. Finally, summer ended, autumn was sweet, and winter set in. I decided to forget about the grass and went inside.

But dwindling grass lay in wait just outside my doorstep. When I left the house, I avoided eye contact with my yard. Then, spring arrived, and we had a nice long rainy season. One day, I ventured into the backyard. Something was different. I felt as if I’d awakened into a fairy tale. A low-to-the-ground plant was flourishing, filling in where the grass had died. It also gathered in large clumps under the post oaks, in swaths around the gardens, and at the edge of the forest. It was soft and beautiful and green. It had little yellow flowers. I recognized it as a volunteer that I had previously called weed. This innocent plant that I had once cursed and pulled was filling my yard with the green carpet I had been craving. I studied its characteristics: leaf shape, size, flower, then I looked it up. Its name is Calyptocarpus vialis. It’s drought resistant and shade tolerant. It accepts moderate foot traffic and feeds pollinators. It spreads by seeds and runners. It grows six to eight inches tall. It can be mowed but needs it only once or twice a year.

Nothing’s perfect, of course. In heat and direct sun this plant still needs water and, where I am at least, it doesn’t spread in the summer. In colder climates, it’s dormant in winter. There’s disagreement on its native range: Some databases list it as native to Texas, and others list it as introduced. Depending on where I looked, I found it listed as a ground cover or a weed. I found no database, however, that labeled it as invasive in Texas. A local naturalist suggested it as a ground cover, which for me gave it a stamp of approval.

But it’s not universally accepted—at least not yet. I think the accusation of weed holds partly because of a nickname for it: Cinderella Weed. That’s not good PR. The plant is also known as Straggler Daisy, Horseherb, and Prostrate Lawnflower. I want to rename it, sort of as a grassroots (or calypto-roots) advertising campaign. It needs a better public image. I want to call it Cinderella Daisy or Little Yellow Lawnflower. It’s a sweet and gentle plant. I want others to love it as I do. I’m waiting for it to fill in my whole lawn. I get dewy eyed watching it—slowly—spread across my yard.

Resources

North Carolina State University Extension. (N.d.). North Carolina Extension gardener plant toolbox. https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/calyptocarpus-vialis

Scott Jenkins, V. (1994). The lawn: A history of an American obsession. Smithsonian Institution Press.

Steinberg, T. (2006). American green: The obsessive quest for the perfect lawn. Norton.

Waitt, D. (2018) Calyptocarpus vialis. Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center Database. https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=cavi2

All photos by Annette deFerrari