Driving south on Naper Boulevard from the East-West Tollway you’ll see a string of houses plopped on grass trimmed so short it hurts just to look at it. Grass, even Kentucky bluegrass, is humiliated by harsh mow jobs. It wants to grow tall, have flowers, have sex the same as any plant. But mowing prevents the messy sexual parts of the grass from ever forming. In his recent book Second Nature Michael Pollan jabs, “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”
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More than 50,000 square miles of America–an area larger than the state of Indiana–are mowed grass. The preferred lawn grass, Kentucky blue, is found in every state in the union and every county in Illinois. It’s by far the most common plant in the Chicago region, according to Morton Arboretum botanists Gerould Wilhelm and Floyd Swink. And it isn’t even native to America–its’ Eurasian.
But on the corner of Naper Boulevard and Staunton Road is a yard that isn’t like the others. The landscaped prairie around the house stands out like the only healthy finger on a hand of sore thumbs.
Armstrong’s yard requires none of these aids from corporate America and has only positive effects on the environment. Yet planting this type of yard does require a lot more thought and planning time. And patience. The first couple of years a prairie yard doesn’t look like much. Once it’s established, you don’t have to weed, water, or fertilize, but that’s three or four years away. And the first years require as much if not more work than a conventional lawn. You have to know you’re going to stay in one place for a while to make the effort worth it–and the average American home owner doesn’t stay put that long.
Since the yard is the place that most people’s major interactions with the natural world take place, wouldn’t it be great if it were a more engaging relationship than a human being plodding around in straight lines back and forth, pushing an engine that cuts off the sex organs of plants? Rather than being mindless dictators over dull monocultures, home owners could become participants in diverse ecosystems.
