U.S. residents spend $12 billion on their lawns annually. To really go green, love your lawn by leaving it alone. 
Before lawns started appearing in front of American houses following the Civil War, most people were content with allowing the greenery surrounding their homes to grow free. If it were a hot summer, the grass would turn brown and die; if it was an especially rainy season, the grass would grow high and the homeowner would cut it down with a scythe. Then the lawnmower arrived in Eden.

The invention of lawnmowers in the mid-1800s, coupled with the fascination and envy of the neatly trimmed gardens and fields of the English gentry, pushed more Americans into lusting after the perfect lawn.

But why? Maintaining a lawn is hard work. To keep it looking neat, clean and trim requires the devotion of a Buddhist monk and the bank account of Rupert Murdoch. Lawn junkies must water their patch of grass regularly, in defiance of nature’s schedule. The more you water, the more you mow, and so the cycle continues, all throughout the summer.

Keeping the lawn properly watered and trimmed requires lots of money, for a top-of-the-line lawnmower, hoses, water, gasoline and so on. And then there are the weeds, bugs and other nasties that try to sabotage your efforts. That means fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers and other noxious chemicals to make a lawn sparkle and shine in exactly the way nature did not intend.

These treatments require money—lots of money. A 2004 survey sponsored by the Professional Landcare Network (PLANET) found that homeowners spent almost $12 billion on their lawns during the previous year.

That sounds like a lot of money, but there’s a lot of grass to care for out there. A 2005 study conducted by NASA researcher Cristina Milesi used satellite and aerial imagery to estimate the total surface area of lawns in the United States. Milesi’s conservative estimate: about 128,000 kilometers, or 79,535 miles, of lawns stretched across the United States.

To put it another way: there are enough lawns in America to blanket the entire state of New Hampshire eight and a half times.

As with any status symbol, lawns come with a hidden cost as well. To keep those 128,000 kilometers of lawns watered and green throughout the summer would require 200 gallons of water per capita, per day. Perhaps that type of watering is an exaggeration, but “in the warmer regions of the country, watering lawns accounts for more than half of the residential water use,” Milesi said in an e-mail interview.

That’s a staggering amount of water under any circumstances. But with many regions across the country facing a strain on water resources, including the Seacoast, keeping lawns wet might further tax already limited supplies.

And carefully grooming your lawn may end up polluting the environment, rather than preserving it. According to Smaller American Lawns Today (SALT), a program at the Connecticut College Arboretum, about 3 million tons of fertilizer are dumped on lawns each year. After making the lawn green, those chemicals trickle down into underground aquifers, further polluting water supplies. And the lawnmowers, weed whackers and other yard maintenance trinkets? They use more than 580 million gallons of gas each year, according to SALT.

The first step on the road to recovery from life as a lawn-junkie is to admit there’s a problem. While lawns might look nice, the slavish devotion with which we water, fertilize and mow them carries with it a whole other set of problems for local ecosystems. But with a little planning and some minor changes, lawn-lovers can redirect their ambition into something smaller and more natural.

a lot of lawns
In 2003, Cristina Milesi wanted to look at the lawns of America. All of them.

While working on a Ph.D. at the University of Montana, Milesi needed to find an estimate of the surface area lawns occupy in the United States for a class project. There was no data published that fit her needs, so Milesi set out to find the information herself. After submitting a proposal to the NASA Earth System Science Fellowship Program, she began a two-year study that used satellite and aerial imagery to determine the amount of lawn space in America.

Milesi’s conservative estimate is that lawns cover about 128,000 square kilometers of the country, making it our largest irrigated “crop,” according to Milesi. In addition, she also tracked the ecological impact of lawns, looking at their effect on water and carbon cycles.

Lawns can have a positive, if small, impact on the environment by playing a role in the carbon cycle, acting as carbon sinks that remove carbon from the atmosphere.

However, “once you add the emissions from the leaf blower, the edge trimmer, the emissions associated with the production and commercialization of fertilizer, etc., there’s not much of a (carbon) sink left,” Milesi says.

Lawn mowers have long been targeted as emission generators. Most lawn mowers, leaf blowers and other lawn care appliances lack catalytic converters, which cut down the amount of pollution generated by an engine. A 2004 study by the California Air Resources Board found that lawn mowers and other engines accounted for 1,726 tons of carbon dioxide emissions in one year, and officials in California are lobbying to have lawnmower manufacturers install catalytic converters in the engines.

According to Milesi, a lawn’s impact also depends on where it is and how it is tended. Lawns treated with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers can have harmful effects, Milesi says, as can lawns that are kept green and watered year round. “I also estimated that the potential for carbon sequestration can be realized only at a huge expense in water resources,” Milesi notes.

To minimize impact, Milesi recommends using grass species more adapted to the local climate, which will reduce the need for watering and help the lawn deal with periods of little or no water. Keeping the grass a little taller also helps. This promotes deeper roots, which in turn helps the grass tolerate water stress, Milesi says. Mulching grass clippings reduces the need for chemical fertilizers, and allowing a few weeds to spring up gives the lawn more biodiversity.

Milesi lives in California and maintains a small lawn as a space for her children to play. But she’s not fanatic about the upkeep.

“I mow it every two or three weeks … and I water just enough so that it barely survives through the long northern California summers,” she says.

local effects
That strain on water sources is playing out locally.

In 2002, the town of Seabrook adopted a ban on outside water usage that remains in effect. Officials in Newmarket also adopted a town-wide ban on outside water use in 2003. The town relies on two wells for its water supply and, after a drought period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, water levels were low, says town administrator Alphonse Dixon.

“We felt it was more important to have drinking water and water for sanitary needs than for watering lawns and washing vehicles,” Dixon says.

Before the water ban, Dixon says water usage peaked at about 550,000-600,000 gallons per day in the summer; after the ban, usage fell to about 450,000 gallons per day.

Compliance with the ban has been voluntary, and so far, there’s been no need for enforcement, according to Dixon. Water levels in the wells have increased, and earlier this month, the Town Council voted to move the water ban from stage 4, which prohibits all outside watering, to stage 3, which allows for limited watering based on the day of the week and a person’s street address. Washing vehicles, driveways and sidewalks is still prohibited.

Commercial fertilizers, which often contain chemicals like nitrogen, can also have a deleterious on the local ecosystem.
A new study by the New Hampshire Estuaries Project found that in 2002, an estimated 1,005 tons of nitrogen entered the Great Bay/Upper Piscataqua estuary in 2002. Of that, only about 28 percent of the nitrogen came from wastewater treatment plants; the rest came from non-point sources like lawn fertilizers, septic systems and animal waste. So far, the nitrogen found in Great Bay hasn’t had a dramatic effect on the estuary, but NHEP coastal scientist Phillip Trowbridge, the study’s author, says it’s important to keep a watchful eye out.

An excessive amount of nitrogen leads to a condition called eutrophication, Trowbridge says. In this case, the nitrogen creates excess nutrients in the water, which in turn leads to large algal blooms. These “make the water unpleasant anyway,” Trowbridge says, but the real problem comes when the algae die and decompose. The decomposition consumes the oxygen in the water, which then destroys fish habitats and other life.

That’s not happening in Great Bay yet, but Trowbridge says subtle changes are occurring in the ecosystem.

“We’re not seeing obvious signs from traditional indicators. There are some changes happening, and they may be related to nitrogen, and they may not be. We’re pretty much in a phase where we’re trying to get ahead of it in our understanding,” he says.

Trowbridge’s study doesn’t break down the non-point sources for nitrogen, but a study by the Hubbard Brook Foundation, a nonprofit environmental organization based in New Hampshire, found that nitrogen fertilizer accounts for 11 to 32 percent of the nitrogen found in the Northeast. According to Hubbard Brook’s study, sales of nitrogen fertilizer in the Northeast increased by 30 percent between 1965 and 2001. However, not all of that fertilizer is needed. The Hubbard Brook study estimates that 20 percent of the nitrogen makes its way into surface and ground waters.

SALT of the earth
Dr. William A. Niering, a botanist and former instructor at the Connecticut College Arboretum, started SALT with his wife in the mid-1990s as a way to promote “home-based naturalistic landscaping using native plants (and) less mowing,” according to Kathy Dame, assistant director of the Arboretum, the home of SALT.

Niering died in 1999, but SALT, and Niering’s idea of more environmentally friendly landscaping practices, lives on at the arboretum.

SALT has since allied with a group called The Wild Ones, a Wisconsin-based organization that also began in the mid-1990s. While SALT’s activities are limited mainly to a yearly symposium at the arboretum, the Wild Ones have established chapters in 12 states. Dame recently started the Connecticut chapter of the Wild Ones.

“For a lot of people, I think as nature recedes with the housing developments, people just naturally have this longing to be involved with their lawn and home grounds and to make it as natural as possible,” she says.

There are plenty of reasons for smaller, more natural lawns, according to Dame. For one thing, those closely-cropped patches of green grass don’t have any of the biodiversity found in nature.

“When I was a kid, we went out and found grasshoppers and things in the lawn. It wasn’t a monoculture,” Dame says. “If you plant one (kind of) seed for a green expanse of lawn, that’s what you’ll get. Nothing. No biodiversity … you don’t have that fulfillment of nature.”

You also expend a lot of time and energy maintaining the lawn, she says.

“(People will) spend the whole weekend sitting on riding lawn mowers, going out to mow the monoculture grass. They’re wasting their own energy, wasting time and they’re putting all that garbage into the atmosphere,” she says.

Opting out doesn’t mean you have to have a “crazy wild lawn,” according to Dame—although you can, if you really want to. The key is to keep things minimal. Mow sparingly, only once or twice a season, and try to have as many native plant species growing as possible. If you want a lawn with a smaller surface area, mulch and other fillers can be used for groundcover. If a lawn is small enough, a reel mower can be used instead of a power mower to further curb air pollution.

“We’re not promoting messy lawns,” Dame says. “We always tell people … sometimes if you let things grow wild, neighbors will complain. So always mow the edges so it looks like you’re taking care of it. You have to make some effort, (but) where it shows you’re doing it in your own style.”

The best way to make the transition is to do it gradually, Dame adds.

“Most people at first, they’re very timid about it, but as they get into it more, they see it’s really not some wild thing,” she says. It’s just a matter of pace. “Do it over the years,” Dame says. “Buy new plants, try to make most of them native to the area … It’s a whole different way of life, but it doesn’t have to change your life completely.”

Though Dame says she’s seeing more and more interest in a natural style of landscaping, it doesn’t seem like the smaller-lawn movement will catch on any time soon. The American affinity for lawns lies in conformity, and with housing developments still popping up everywhere, that desire for conformity is increasing.

“I think it’s how teenagers want to do just like their peers do, and I think that’s a lot of it. I think people don’t dare to be different,” Dame says.

Even in Dame’s family, not everyone is convinced that lawns should be smaller.

“One of my sons, he says he’s going to start another group—he’s teasing me, of course—and call it BALT, ‘Bigger American Lawns Today,’” she says.  He kind of half appreciates it, but he thinks I’m a little far out.”

what you can do
Making the transition from a fertilizing fiend to a more sensible, environmentally friendly lawn owner isn’t difficult.
Julia Peterson, water resources specialist with the UNH Cooperative Extension, compiled some easy tips.

• Test soil before applying fertilizers: Before you start applying fertilizer willy-nilly, find out what exactly is already in your lawn. The University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension Soils lab conducts soil analysis for landowners; for soil testing guidelines, visit the UNH Cooperative Extension Web site: www.ceinfo.unh.edu.

• Use organic or slow-release fertilizer for your lawn: Slow-release nitrogen is often listed on fertilizer bags as “water insoluble nitrogen” (WIN). If the WIN number is more than half the amount of nitrogen listed on the bag, it’s a slow-release fertilizer. Fall is the best time to apply fertilizer. Just before a rain storm is the worst time to apply fertilizer, as it will run off the lawn and into water supplies.

• Water slowly and deeply: Fewer watering sessions promote deeper, stronger roots in the lawn. Water early in the morning to ensure water is not lost through evaporation during the heat of the day. Keep watering levels to no more than an inch a week.

• Leave those clippings alone: Grass clippings act as a natural fertilizer by retaining moisture and replacing nutrients in the soil.

• Plant grasses that require less work: Grass varieties such as hard fescue, chewing fescue, perennial ryegrass and others require less mowing, watering and fertilizing.

• Reduce the size of your lawn: Use mulch and other fillers as ground cover to reduce the size of your lawn. Plant perennials and other local, native plant species. Instead of using a power mower, invest in an old-fashioned reel push mower.

• Remove pests and weeds by hand: Insects and weeds don’t necessarily mean doom for your lawn. Eschew chemicals and remove wayward critters and weeds by hand. If you do use pesticides and weed-killers, check the water quality information on the label and be sure not to apply them before a rain.

For more information, visit www.ceinfo.unh.edu or call the UNH Cooperative Extension Family, Home and Garden Education Center at 1-877-398-4769.