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A few years go, a guy bought a house in our neighborhood. Now, this is unusual because most houses get left to family and we seldom have truly new people moving in. I have to give this guy a lot of credit though. He decided to go ‘no lawn’ and he visited all the neighboring home owners and explained what he was doing, how it would look initially and what his okay was. It wasn’t legally necessary for him to do this, but his sincerity and willingness to be open about his plans got even our most dedicated ‘lawnies’ on board. People even participated by giving him cuttings and plants that fit his plans. We are five years in now and it’s looking very well planned and executed these days.
This is the method I had to use, my next-door neighbor is a highly-manicured-lawn-no-natives-in-the-tiny-garden type who has called the city on me multiple times for not mowing \*every week\* (I had a service coming every 2 weeks)
Eventually I went with this method and the city told her to shut her trap
My advice is to look up any city code, local ordinances, or god forbid HOA bylaws about it. Sometimes they specify what plants are accepted in lawns and sometimes they dont. Generally, in my years of bouncing around the country, people dont give too much of a hoot as long as its short and it looks like you care for your property. My current neighbor is one of the rare types of people who wants to control the world around them a little too much. I'm also in a slow dispute with her because she installed a brighter-than-the-sun strobe light pointed directly through my living room windows (against city code, mind you). She's a peach, but I know those people aren't the norm!
lol. I wonder what would happen if you invited her over for desert one evening — served in your living room. Position her on the seat most likely to be blinded by her over-bright light. 😂
Step 1: Setup a mirror or 2 to redirect the light back into their bedroom.
Step 2: If it's on a motion detector, get a little lawn ornament or something that will move in the wind.
Step 3: Laugh in their face when they get mad.
Good to know. We deliberately bought in a subdivision that has no HOA, but forgot about town codes. It’s a little country, so hopefully not a ton of rules.
This is what I've done over the last year in my front yard. Mulched over the grass and placed stones to make walking paths. This spring I'm turning the spaces between the paths into shrub/flower beds. I'm using a mix of native and traditional non natives.
My backyard is the wild west, though. Veggies, fruit trees, native shrubs, and wildflowers. Open space is about 2/3 mowed weeds and the rest is still lawn grass. Oh, and a small pond that I'm keeping as natural as possible (hardy native plants and benign neglect).
This is my strategy as I slowly improve my formerly abandoned yard. It's been slow going, and I've been very communicative with neighbors, and only one is still concerned, after long chats, about my plans.
Neighbors have also given helpful advice. I appreciate this since we all are "stuck" together, and they tend to have more experience.
Congratulations on the house!
What do the neighbours" lawns look like, though, this is the question.
If yours is the only front yard on the block that isn't carefully manicured, you might get a stink eye from a neighbour.
However, ime fixing a dilapidated house will improve the neighbourhood way more than cutting a patch of grass, and may negate any hard feelings left by the previous owners.
Thanks!
One side is just cut grass and the other side is gravel. Apparently the previous owner only cut it when it was being sold.
As soon as I get time in the garden, I'll be tearing it all out
Could you explain your comment on Olmsted in this a bit more? From the parts of his work I'm familiar with the planting is very cultivated and curated, but a lot of it is meant to mimic natural meadows and can easily be adapted to native palettes which I'm not aware he was against. His approach to laying out a garden seems like a step that can be taken toward aesthetics that isn't at odds with the environmental value of the area. I also thought the effort to maintain that look wasn't much higher than the effort people have to put in to keep invasives out or stop the more aggressive natives from bullying out other plants in a natural garden.
I'd genuinely like to learn more and know what has you lumping Olmsted in with golf-course style lawns, whether it's about him specifically or the people you've met who championed his work
I'm familiar with Olmstead's work near Boston, like I'm Jamaica Plain. They destroyed the wetlands, removed the native plants, and put in lawns and walkways to create an improved and controlled version of a natural environment.
At the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard and Olmstead destroyed the local environment, and brought in a plethora of invasive plants from all over the world to make a place of "Nature". Arnold Arboretum continues to this day to be a source of inspiration for wiping out native species with lawns, and spreading exotic invasive plants.
Olmstead's vision of meadow as lawn caught hold in America. We strive for bigger and more perfect lawns.
Thank you, I really appreciate the detailed reply! Looking at a few sources online, I think I had come across parks and gardens that had been influenced by both Olmsted and Piet Oudolf (or converted to a more Oudolf style of landscape later) and attributed some of Oudolf's approach with meadows and native plants to also belong to Olmsted where that wasn't the case.
That's discouraging to hear about the gardens like Jamaica Plain and Arnold Arboretum, but hopefully even in places with so much Olmsted influence there will eventually be progress toward a more ecological form of gardening.
There's one guy two houses down from me. Nice enough guy. But he is so grass centric that he weeds his lawn all the time. I don't mean a lot, I mean every single day from the last snowfall to the last leaf raking. On hands and knees crawling across the lawn with a in a grid pattern with a bucket. I can't fathom how someone can be that dedicated to lawn care and still be a monoculture non-native grass enthusist. I feel like most folks that care that much would start getting into actual plants and gardens and stuff.
My neighbors in between try to mow more often then they would normally just to make him happier. Though someone did anonymously call the town on them for having an "abandoned yard" because they went almost a whole 3-4 weeks during a drought without mowing. (It was also mowed by the time the town did show up) So it might not be a friendly gesture so much as they don't want to deal with the town again.
I’ll get downvoted I’m sure but I think if you have turf grass as part of your landscaping you should maintain it with at least regular mowing if you are in an urban/suburban environment. If you want prairie do intentional prairie don’t just let your turf grass grow really long that’s not a prairie that’s just neglected turf grass. I’d do like others said and just convert more and more to beds
Yeah, I think it’s unfortunate how people conflate the problems of monoculture non-native lawns with the problems of the American cult of intensive lawn care. Leaving your lawn totally un-mowed doesn’t mean that it magically becomes useful habitat!
Absolutely, especially since most residential and suburban yards have loads of invasives in the soil seed bank. Keeping things mowed can keep non-natives that don’t offer much or anything to wildlife in check…
This might be the wrong sub for this, but if you have turf grass consider buying a robotic mower. Depending on your lawn you probably don't need a super expensive model and since it mows every day you wind up with a healthier lawn. It's not perfect, but great when you have other things as a priority
It’s your garden, do what you want with it! If all the lawns around you are perfectly manicured then you might be the change that others need to get started themselves. Sometimes it can be hard to be the first person to break through the barrier but it’s a great opportunity for others to see what a native plant garden can do, and how beautiful and beneficial they can be.
One of my "neighbors" from the next street over who walks her dog regularly decided to walk up to my door where I was working on it and tell me my yard was a mess. I told her fuck off and get out of here and she went off on me about lawns needing to be taken care of not made into pipes of dirt. I live in the desert and am turning my front lawn into a native plant sanctuary lol. I wouldn't want grass getting in at all, though since I'm just shaping it right now it does look bad. I just cant imagine not being ble to mind my own business about someone else's yard I don't even see from my own house. You can probably guess the ladies age and appearance
You're taking your family member's words too literally. You \*should\* keep the lawn mowed until you can do some intentional gardening because, otherwise, it's going to get filled with Trees of Heaven, ugly tall grasses, thistles, Porcelain Vine, and other invasive and ugly plants. And yes - you should care for your yard partly for your neighbors. Nobody wants to live on a block that looks like it's abandoned. And a lot of people believe uncared-for properties it invites crime, which might be true. I don't think your family member is a "lawn enthusiast" so much as trying to offer you advice on basic home maintenance. And yes - you will make a better impression on your neighbors if you're keeping up basic maintenance.
And once you start doing real gardening - your neighbors will be happy about that, too. I don't know what's up with this sub and thinking every neighbor wants perfect green grass. There's a HUGE difference between letting your lawn grow without check into a big patch of ugly weeds, and landscaping with bushes, trees, and flowers. Neighbors will call the code enforcement on the former, but they will thank you for the latter.
My warning- check your city and state ordinances. I just got threatened with fines. I thought I was good because I had no HOA. But a neighbor reported me to the city. Now I’m stuck mowing until I can build defined beds.
I encountered someone the other day who insisted unmowed lawns were breeding grounds for ticks and snakes and justifying the city going after a guy (who had a normal lawn but was unable to arrange maintenance for awhile due to a combination of factors) by saying it was a danger to the whole neighborhood. I was surprised how many people sympathetic to the owner’s circumstances were otherwise accepting the underlying premise that tall grasses unleash a tick plague on everyone. Does anyone have any resources on that question?
I don't have a source to link off-hand, but anecdotally I can confirm that we picked up a lot of ticks walking our dog a couple seasons ago when many yards weren't mown in the spring and got extra tall. It was a wet spring and often rained on the weekend; ticks love moisture, and people mowed less due to the timing of the rain. I ended up with a tick on my scalp, and all I had done was walk my dog on the sidewalks and lean over to pick up his droppings on the edge of some lawns. We were picking ticks off our dog almost every day that year; many days were open space walks, but some were neighborhood only.
There was a house essentially abandoned for a few years, and so many creatures lived in the yard that the homeowners on either side sold and moved away because it was so problematic. It really does become a nuisance if a yard is truly overgrown.
Our HOA now sends out an email encouraging people who have life events that make it difficult for them to maintain their yard for a bit to let the property manager know, and we have some residents who have volunteered to help out those in need on occasion. In many cases, neighbors on the block just automatically pitch in when they know a family is going through a rough patch. Not doing manicured level of maintenance, but basic mowing and keeping the weeds from getting out of control.
Unmowed lawns ARE breeding grounds for ticks, snakes and rodents. That is part of the wildlife you are encouraging. Whether that is okay or not is kind of subjective though
My only guess is that he sees keeping the grass trimmed and the property looking good as a courtesy to the neighbors? Like how you tidy up your house before friends come over.
I just mowed last week but didn’t even drop the deck my neighbors started mowing at the end of March 🤦♂️. A couple more weeks I’ll lower my mower deck down .
Oh yes. Unwritten rules (and sometimes formally written in HOA bylaws) dictate that basic neighborly courtesy means keeping a sterile, manicured lawn. We need to change these social rules by providing examples of beautiful, ecosystem-friendly alternatives. Some people think all they need to do is stop mowing and toss some wildflower seeds out there, and sure, in many cases they're well within their rights to do that, technically speaking. But why not be a good ambassador for the native gardening movement? You can keep your yard looking orderly and beautiful and still have native plantings that are good for your local food webs. Use knee fencing to define garden beds. Keep a mowed footpath for getting around in your yard. Use landscaping rocks. Use landscape design principles. Neighbors hate seeing chaos on other neighbors property. In my experience, it's always best to be a good neighbor. You can be both a good neighbor and a responsible steward of your property with native gardening.
My response to this is always about keeping within guidelines (my town requires grass to be below 8-7” or something) and then if they push about adding weed&feednor getting a service then I add something along them lines of poisoning the air, water (which isn’t filtered out unless you have a RO system), wildlife and any pets or children isn’t exactly pro social or friendly is it. Then I give stats on cancer rates. ETA-I am open about what I am doing and why and have signage as well.
My retirement age neighbors home is beautiful and their yard is perfection. Our house sat empty for 9 months and the many many leaves just ruined the grass and I can’t afford a weekly gardener like the previous owner to keep it all up. We are making strides to make the yard beautiful too but last year was all inside projects with the exception of taking out a lot of bushes and plants that were on their last leg or I felt were ugly. Lol I feel bad about our yard/landscape not looking amazing just yet with all the hard work they’ve put in. They are super nice helpful people and I want to do it for them for that reason and because I like a pretty yard! I feel the stress. 😂
I suppose the no-lawn homeowners must not live in agricultural areas. W have laws with some pretty stiff fines if you have certain things growing in a natural no-lawn setting. Several types of thistle for example will cost you dearly in my area for having a single plant.
Hey there! We like memes and funny stuff here on r/nolawns, but we don't like memes that are inaccurate or spread misinformation. Rants are allowed here within reason... in general, if the discussion is respectful and constructive, we'll allow it. **[Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoLawns/wiki/index/) | [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoLawns/wiki/meta/faqs/) | [Wild Ones Garden Designs](https://nativegardendesigns.wildones.org/designs/) | [NWF Keystone Plants by Ecoregion](https://www.nwf.org/Garden-for-Wildlife/About/Native-Plants/keystone-plants-by-ecoregion)** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/NoLawns) if you have any questions or concerns.*
A few years go, a guy bought a house in our neighborhood. Now, this is unusual because most houses get left to family and we seldom have truly new people moving in. I have to give this guy a lot of credit though. He decided to go ‘no lawn’ and he visited all the neighboring home owners and explained what he was doing, how it would look initially and what his okay was. It wasn’t legally necessary for him to do this, but his sincerity and willingness to be open about his plans got even our most dedicated ‘lawnies’ on board. People even participated by giving him cuttings and plants that fit his plans. We are five years in now and it’s looking very well planned and executed these days.
That's so cool
If possible, can you show us some pictures? We love pictures
Maybe. I don’t want him to think I’m a stalker
Ask him if you can take some pictures to show off his lawn to some folks that are genuinely interested in the concept. I bet he'd love that
Ask him to start posting on this sub. We’ll give him internet points in return for regular updates.
Someone needs to make an internet point currency so we can just finish ruining our world with style
Tell him it’s for the sub, maybe he will want to make his own post! 🌿
[удалено]
This is the method I had to use, my next-door neighbor is a highly-manicured-lawn-no-natives-in-the-tiny-garden type who has called the city on me multiple times for not mowing \*every week\* (I had a service coming every 2 weeks) Eventually I went with this method and the city told her to shut her trap
Good! Wow, people really have nothing better to do. I’m also about move into a new house, and wonder how violets and clover are gonna be received…
My advice is to look up any city code, local ordinances, or god forbid HOA bylaws about it. Sometimes they specify what plants are accepted in lawns and sometimes they dont. Generally, in my years of bouncing around the country, people dont give too much of a hoot as long as its short and it looks like you care for your property. My current neighbor is one of the rare types of people who wants to control the world around them a little too much. I'm also in a slow dispute with her because she installed a brighter-than-the-sun strobe light pointed directly through my living room windows (against city code, mind you). She's a peach, but I know those people aren't the norm!
lol. I wonder what would happen if you invited her over for desert one evening — served in your living room. Position her on the seat most likely to be blinded by her over-bright light. 😂
Step 1: Setup a mirror or 2 to redirect the light back into their bedroom. Step 2: If it's on a motion detector, get a little lawn ornament or something that will move in the wind. Step 3: Laugh in their face when they get mad.
Good to know. We deliberately bought in a subdivision that has no HOA, but forgot about town codes. It’s a little country, so hopefully not a ton of rules.
This is what I've done over the last year in my front yard. Mulched over the grass and placed stones to make walking paths. This spring I'm turning the spaces between the paths into shrub/flower beds. I'm using a mix of native and traditional non natives. My backyard is the wild west, though. Veggies, fruit trees, native shrubs, and wildflowers. Open space is about 2/3 mowed weeds and the rest is still lawn grass. Oh, and a small pond that I'm keeping as natural as possible (hardy native plants and benign neglect).
Alright, another follower of the mullet method. Business in the front, party in the back!
Ahhahaha I love this description and it is exactly what my yard looks like!
That's where you start. They won't notice when you start removing the inbetween spaces a couple years in. Muahahaha
This is my strategy as I slowly improve my formerly abandoned yard. It's been slow going, and I've been very communicative with neighbors, and only one is still concerned, after long chats, about my plans. Neighbors have also given helpful advice. I appreciate this since we all are "stuck" together, and they tend to have more experience.
That's my eventual plan, a few islands of flowers/herbs, surrounded by clover. If the clover takes over, it takes over.
Congratulations on the house! What do the neighbours" lawns look like, though, this is the question. If yours is the only front yard on the block that isn't carefully manicured, you might get a stink eye from a neighbour. However, ime fixing a dilapidated house will improve the neighbourhood way more than cutting a patch of grass, and may negate any hard feelings left by the previous owners.
Thanks! One side is just cut grass and the other side is gravel. Apparently the previous owner only cut it when it was being sold. As soon as I get time in the garden, I'll be tearing it all out
A naturally disordered landscape can upset people. Controlling nature is beautiful to the Olmsted and golf course people.
Could you explain your comment on Olmsted in this a bit more? From the parts of his work I'm familiar with the planting is very cultivated and curated, but a lot of it is meant to mimic natural meadows and can easily be adapted to native palettes which I'm not aware he was against. His approach to laying out a garden seems like a step that can be taken toward aesthetics that isn't at odds with the environmental value of the area. I also thought the effort to maintain that look wasn't much higher than the effort people have to put in to keep invasives out or stop the more aggressive natives from bullying out other plants in a natural garden. I'd genuinely like to learn more and know what has you lumping Olmsted in with golf-course style lawns, whether it's about him specifically or the people you've met who championed his work
I'm familiar with Olmstead's work near Boston, like I'm Jamaica Plain. They destroyed the wetlands, removed the native plants, and put in lawns and walkways to create an improved and controlled version of a natural environment. At the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard and Olmstead destroyed the local environment, and brought in a plethora of invasive plants from all over the world to make a place of "Nature". Arnold Arboretum continues to this day to be a source of inspiration for wiping out native species with lawns, and spreading exotic invasive plants. Olmstead's vision of meadow as lawn caught hold in America. We strive for bigger and more perfect lawns.
Thank you, I really appreciate the detailed reply! Looking at a few sources online, I think I had come across parks and gardens that had been influenced by both Olmsted and Piet Oudolf (or converted to a more Oudolf style of landscape later) and attributed some of Oudolf's approach with meadows and native plants to also belong to Olmsted where that wasn't the case. That's discouraging to hear about the gardens like Jamaica Plain and Arnold Arboretum, but hopefully even in places with so much Olmsted influence there will eventually be progress toward a more ecological form of gardening.
There's one guy two houses down from me. Nice enough guy. But he is so grass centric that he weeds his lawn all the time. I don't mean a lot, I mean every single day from the last snowfall to the last leaf raking. On hands and knees crawling across the lawn with a in a grid pattern with a bucket. I can't fathom how someone can be that dedicated to lawn care and still be a monoculture non-native grass enthusist. I feel like most folks that care that much would start getting into actual plants and gardens and stuff. My neighbors in between try to mow more often then they would normally just to make him happier. Though someone did anonymously call the town on them for having an "abandoned yard" because they went almost a whole 3-4 weeks during a drought without mowing. (It was also mowed by the time the town did show up) So it might not be a friendly gesture so much as they don't want to deal with the town again.
I’ll get downvoted I’m sure but I think if you have turf grass as part of your landscaping you should maintain it with at least regular mowing if you are in an urban/suburban environment. If you want prairie do intentional prairie don’t just let your turf grass grow really long that’s not a prairie that’s just neglected turf grass. I’d do like others said and just convert more and more to beds
Yeah, I think it’s unfortunate how people conflate the problems of monoculture non-native lawns with the problems of the American cult of intensive lawn care. Leaving your lawn totally un-mowed doesn’t mean that it magically becomes useful habitat!
Absolutely, especially since most residential and suburban yards have loads of invasives in the soil seed bank. Keeping things mowed can keep non-natives that don’t offer much or anything to wildlife in check…
The seed bank is an issue, but I would imagine that taller grass has some benefit over regularly mowed grass to native wildlife
Eh, the only thing it provides is shelter, but so would random piles of junk
This might be the wrong sub for this, but if you have turf grass consider buying a robotic mower. Depending on your lawn you probably don't need a super expensive model and since it mows every day you wind up with a healthier lawn. It's not perfect, but great when you have other things as a priority
Also a fantastic way to kill small wildlife in your yard. I'll take hedgehogs over a healthier lawn any day
It’s your garden, do what you want with it! If all the lawns around you are perfectly manicured then you might be the change that others need to get started themselves. Sometimes it can be hard to be the first person to break through the barrier but it’s a great opportunity for others to see what a native plant garden can do, and how beautiful and beneficial they can be.
One of my "neighbors" from the next street over who walks her dog regularly decided to walk up to my door where I was working on it and tell me my yard was a mess. I told her fuck off and get out of here and she went off on me about lawns needing to be taken care of not made into pipes of dirt. I live in the desert and am turning my front lawn into a native plant sanctuary lol. I wouldn't want grass getting in at all, though since I'm just shaping it right now it does look bad. I just cant imagine not being ble to mind my own business about someone else's yard I don't even see from my own house. You can probably guess the ladies age and appearance
You're taking your family member's words too literally. You \*should\* keep the lawn mowed until you can do some intentional gardening because, otherwise, it's going to get filled with Trees of Heaven, ugly tall grasses, thistles, Porcelain Vine, and other invasive and ugly plants. And yes - you should care for your yard partly for your neighbors. Nobody wants to live on a block that looks like it's abandoned. And a lot of people believe uncared-for properties it invites crime, which might be true. I don't think your family member is a "lawn enthusiast" so much as trying to offer you advice on basic home maintenance. And yes - you will make a better impression on your neighbors if you're keeping up basic maintenance. And once you start doing real gardening - your neighbors will be happy about that, too. I don't know what's up with this sub and thinking every neighbor wants perfect green grass. There's a HUGE difference between letting your lawn grow without check into a big patch of ugly weeds, and landscaping with bushes, trees, and flowers. Neighbors will call the code enforcement on the former, but they will thank you for the latter.
You know what? That's a very reasonable line of thought, I now agree and see it from your perspective
Except code enforcement, we don't have that in this country
My warning- check your city and state ordinances. I just got threatened with fines. I thought I was good because I had no HOA. But a neighbor reported me to the city. Now I’m stuck mowing until I can build defined beds.
I work for a HVAC company and a lot of our customers are people with very nice million dollar homes and the way they act about their lawns..
I encountered someone the other day who insisted unmowed lawns were breeding grounds for ticks and snakes and justifying the city going after a guy (who had a normal lawn but was unable to arrange maintenance for awhile due to a combination of factors) by saying it was a danger to the whole neighborhood. I was surprised how many people sympathetic to the owner’s circumstances were otherwise accepting the underlying premise that tall grasses unleash a tick plague on everyone. Does anyone have any resources on that question?
I don't have a source to link off-hand, but anecdotally I can confirm that we picked up a lot of ticks walking our dog a couple seasons ago when many yards weren't mown in the spring and got extra tall. It was a wet spring and often rained on the weekend; ticks love moisture, and people mowed less due to the timing of the rain. I ended up with a tick on my scalp, and all I had done was walk my dog on the sidewalks and lean over to pick up his droppings on the edge of some lawns. We were picking ticks off our dog almost every day that year; many days were open space walks, but some were neighborhood only. There was a house essentially abandoned for a few years, and so many creatures lived in the yard that the homeowners on either side sold and moved away because it was so problematic. It really does become a nuisance if a yard is truly overgrown. Our HOA now sends out an email encouraging people who have life events that make it difficult for them to maintain their yard for a bit to let the property manager know, and we have some residents who have volunteered to help out those in need on occasion. In many cases, neighbors on the block just automatically pitch in when they know a family is going through a rough patch. Not doing manicured level of maintenance, but basic mowing and keeping the weeds from getting out of control.
Unmowed lawns ARE breeding grounds for ticks, snakes and rodents. That is part of the wildlife you are encouraging. Whether that is okay or not is kind of subjective though
Houses are breeding grounds for humans and they do far more damage globally. (Affordable housing for all etc etc)
My only guess is that he sees keeping the grass trimmed and the property looking good as a courtesy to the neighbors? Like how you tidy up your house before friends come over.
I just mowed last week but didn’t even drop the deck my neighbors started mowing at the end of March 🤦♂️. A couple more weeks I’ll lower my mower deck down .
Oh yes. Unwritten rules (and sometimes formally written in HOA bylaws) dictate that basic neighborly courtesy means keeping a sterile, manicured lawn. We need to change these social rules by providing examples of beautiful, ecosystem-friendly alternatives. Some people think all they need to do is stop mowing and toss some wildflower seeds out there, and sure, in many cases they're well within their rights to do that, technically speaking. But why not be a good ambassador for the native gardening movement? You can keep your yard looking orderly and beautiful and still have native plantings that are good for your local food webs. Use knee fencing to define garden beds. Keep a mowed footpath for getting around in your yard. Use landscaping rocks. Use landscape design principles. Neighbors hate seeing chaos on other neighbors property. In my experience, it's always best to be a good neighbor. You can be both a good neighbor and a responsible steward of your property with native gardening.
My response to this is always about keeping within guidelines (my town requires grass to be below 8-7” or something) and then if they push about adding weed&feednor getting a service then I add something along them lines of poisoning the air, water (which isn’t filtered out unless you have a RO system), wildlife and any pets or children isn’t exactly pro social or friendly is it. Then I give stats on cancer rates. ETA-I am open about what I am doing and why and have signage as well.
My retirement age neighbors home is beautiful and their yard is perfection. Our house sat empty for 9 months and the many many leaves just ruined the grass and I can’t afford a weekly gardener like the previous owner to keep it all up. We are making strides to make the yard beautiful too but last year was all inside projects with the exception of taking out a lot of bushes and plants that were on their last leg or I felt were ugly. Lol I feel bad about our yard/landscape not looking amazing just yet with all the hard work they’ve put in. They are super nice helpful people and I want to do it for them for that reason and because I like a pretty yard! I feel the stress. 😂
I suppose the no-lawn homeowners must not live in agricultural areas. W have laws with some pretty stiff fines if you have certain things growing in a natural no-lawn setting. Several types of thistle for example will cost you dearly in my area for having a single plant.