Two Ways of Wilding the Grass

For the curious and self-indulgent

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One of the ironies of modern environmental consciousness is that those who are quick to warn us of the dangers are also slow to celebrate the victories. For instance: global honeybee populations have rebounded. Of course, songbirds are still dying en masse and native bee numbers are still in decline, but the “world without bees” many of us imagined ten years ago, in which agriculture had collapsed because there were no honeybees to pollinate things for us, turns out to have been a nightmare we woke up from. I’d imagine that environmentalists are reluctant to celebrate this fact because they don’t want to send the wrong signal, since there are still big problems with the way our agriculture is working, and lots of animals are still dying. But, if you are one of the thousands of Americans who are considering “re-wilding” part of your lawn to save the bees, you should know that a significant victory has already been won along that front. And that’s a good thing.

Yet if you want or need motivation to replace some of your lawn with trees or flowers, you’ll not have to look very far to find it. You could still make compassion your primary impetus: there are birds, like the purple finch, that apparently still need us to change our planting habits in order to survive. And there are insects in their quadrillions that really don’t like being sprayed with broad-spectrum pesticides so that we can keep our green grass. If these notions prick your conscience, you have my blessing to act.

But I think we can move beyond guilt to find an even better motivation for putting flowers in our lawns: self-indulgence. If you are like me, once you put flowers on your property—especially flowers that can be cut and brought inside—you’ll find that you never want to go back. And the birds and insects that flock to your garden once this process gets going are also a joy. I can’t count how many times I’ve lingered by our dining room window to watch a robin, junco, or goldfinch nipping seeds from the spent heads of coneflowers or cleaning its wings in a puddle. Apart from being biological deserts, lawns are growing, dare I say it? a bit passe. Americans are feeling less and less of the need to mimic eighteenth-century English gentry, are growing more and more willing to rely on communal green spaces like parks or fields, and are instead falling in love with more dynamic landscapes.

But there are practical concerns that can stymie these efforts on the bitter shoals of unanswered questions. It so happens that I have wilded not just one green space, but two, using two different methods. For the benefit of the self-indulgent, the ecologically-minded, and the curious, I thought I would briefly outline both methods, so you can choose the one best suited to your needs.

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1/ Smaller Spaces: Pull Up and Replace the Grass Entirely

Grass has the maddening habit of always growing where you don’t want it and never growing where you do. If you desperately want a perfect green sward, chances are your grass will die on you for no reason. But if you’re trying to grow something in or near it, the grass will defend its territory with relentless aggression. The upshot is that, given a smaller space, you’ll want to eliminate competition from grass entirely. At CCA, when we wanted to create a small wildflower garden near the high school entrance, I had a group of about twelve students cut around the whole area with spades and edgers, then roll up the grass and lift it entirely away. This is an arduous process—much too difficult to do by hand on a larger scale. Once the grass was gone, we raked the underlayer of soil to loosen everything and foster good seed contact, then spread wildflower seeds, mixed with sand for even distribution, and watered the whole thing in. After that, the space required essentially no maintenance and grew into a gorgeous, buzzing, breezy bank of flowers that lasted from June to November and which promises to return next year. That’s a lot of bang for your buck.

By the way, I cannot recommend American Meadows’ wildflower seed mixes enough for these sorts of projects. The company creates specialized blends organized by region—a very useful curation process that maximizes your chances of beauty and success.

It’s possible that you could achieve similar results over a larger area by tilling in the grass using a rototiller. But the roots of grass are as stubborn as New England Patriots fans: they do not accept defeat, and I suspect that tilling them into the soil would only result in a gigantic weeding problem later on.

2/ Larger Spaces: Harrow, Scalp, and Overseed

But perhaps you’re looking at wilding a larger space than just a patch of lawn. Perhaps you want to go big. If this is the case, I would recommend the strategy we cooked up when we started converting the large field of grass in front of CCA into what is now the orchard. Since it would have been a herculean task to remove all that grass, our strategy was simply to minimize competition as much as we could. We started in late fall by using rakes to “harrow” or de-thatch the existing field, going over the whole space systematically and composting the large tufts of dead grass we pulled away. After that, we “scalped” the field by making hundreds of shallow, two-foot-wide cuts in the lawn that exposed the bare topsoil, forming small oases where flower seeds could grow without competition. Once that was done, we used a hand broadcaster to spread the seed in December, allowing the cold weather to scarify them, maximizing potential germination come spring.

There are still plenty of families here at school who dislike the wildness of the orchard, and that’s alright. It’s hard to sell a certain kind of landscape to a certain kind of person. Also, as I’ve written before, the design philosophy of that space, which relies on the orderly rows of orchard trees coming into their own and visually offsetting the froth of wildflowers below, hasn’t yet been fully realized. And this tension illustrates an important point: no matter which of these strategies you use, you’re going to have to make the space ugly for a little while before it gets beautiful. Grass is nothing if not consistent: mowed low, it is an even plane, a backdrop, a non-entity. But flowers embody the cycle of the seasons, with their moments of beauty as well as their more dilapidated phases. And on reflection, this might not be a vice on the flowers’ part, but one of their greatest virtues, because it puts us back in touch with reality.

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