You could say that I am not a big fan of lawns. Oh sure, I love to play a game of football or walk the dogs on some green turf. But lawns are the landscape default mode for most human habitat--college campuses, city parks, subdivisions, and businesses. You will find lawns even where they aren't really necessary, mostly because we feel compelled to control nature. Rachel Carson once wrote that "the control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man." She's right, we cannot control nature without feeling its aftereffects.
I have removed significant amounts of turf from very place that I have ever lived and gardened upon. That goes for most projects that I have worked on as well. At my previous home on the Gulf Coast, I drowned 60% of the existing lawn area by deeply burying it in pine needles from the 17 mature longleaf pines on my property. To build my beds, I simply raked paths in the pine straw. Within a few short years I had effectively killed the lawn underneath and even began to build an organic layer. All that I had to do was to plant directly into the pine straw. I reduced two and half hours of weekly mowing and edging to about thirty-five minutes of sweat.
But I noticed in lawn that I did keep, a wealth of native and exotic wildflowers grew in it. And if it was too wet to mow in some weeks, I had a healthy and beautiful wildflower garden that resulted. I stopped mowing when the lyre leaf sage came into bloom (Salvia lyrata), and mowed when their seed dispersed, ensuring new blooms and plants for the following year. I even did a species count once and identified around 15 species in a square meter. Not bad in biodiversity terms.
Some herbaceous plants will grow quite well with regular mowings of the lawn. Below is a list of species that are turf companions, will bloom and benefit the pollinators in your neighborhood.
Native species of grass companions:
- Blue eyed grasses (Sisyrinchium, several species) not a true grass but a member of the iris family, with pretty blue flowers
- Cinquefoils, (Potentilla). Similar to wild strawberries
- Wild strawberries (Fragaria, several species). The five lobed leaves of this and those of cinquefoils are very similar in appearance
- Yellow violets (Viola pennsylvanica). A few other species of violets are also native
- Spring beauties (Claytonia spp.)
- Wild geraniums, crane’s-bills (Geranium spp.)
- Azure bluets (Houstonia caerulea)
- Speedwells (Veronica), with several species, some native others introduced
- Wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella), used as ground cover by some gardeners
- Smartweeds, knotweeds, many species in the genus Polygonum; some are small enough to do well in lawns. Some species are native and others introduced
- Asters (Symphyotrichum spp.) are great in the fall. Some grow rather tall, better for a meadow than a lawn; but if mowed not too frequently, they can do well and bloom heavily inviting many species of pollinators
- Chickweeds include two genera: Cerastium and Stellaria. They are also known by several other common names; some species, such as field chickweed, (Cerastium arvense) and star chickweed (Stellaria pubera), are native. They are small enough to do well in lawns
Non-native species of grass companions:
- Clover, (white clover, Trifolium repens) a European plant very well established in the United States. Grass-seed mixes used to include it. It is highly beneficial because it fixes nitrogen, thus enriching the soil. Newly developed herbicides killed clover, along with the undesirable broad-leaved weeds, so it was declared a weed by the gardening industry and removed from grass-seed mixes. A few species of clover are native to some regions of North America and it may be possible to grow them as grass companions
- Creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum) has sometimes been used as ground cover
- Chickweed, also called starweed, winterweed, satin flower or tongue grass (Stellaria media), is not native. Its seeds are eaten by some birds, hence the name chickweed. It has very small, star shaped flowers
- Gill over the ground, or ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea), is rather pretty but it tends to become invasive
- Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) is among the non-native invasives which you may not want to see around but it is so widespread that perhaps we can’t do much about it
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