About

My house and my yard are in the suburbs Northwest of Chicago. Before this area was developed in the 1950s, it was farmed by immigrant Germans who began to arrive in the 1830s. And before that the Prairie Algonquin tribes lived in the tall grass prairie that has all but disappeared. There are patches here and there — I have volunteered an occasional Sunday morning to cut back Buckthorn in a local prairie restoration area. I wish I could do more ….

The idea for this site began in 1989 when my Italian professor at the University of Michigan described how much she hated mowing her lawn and, at a certain point, got fed up with her neighbors’ complaints and the citations from the Ann Arbor lawn police — she sprayed Round Up on her lawn, corner-to-corner, and covered it with rocks.

That’s one way to deal with the lawn issue. The woman was in her 60’s, massively arthritic, crotchety and eccentric. Just another member of Ann Arbor’s cosmopolitan force of odd people. But she opened my eyes to the idea that green green grass isn’t the only thing you can do with a quarter-acre estate, and you don’t have to be a slave to your lawn-mower.

My parents live in an older Chicago suburb, so their yard is actually larger than the standard quarter-acre you now get in new cookie-cutter developments. For as long as I can remember, they have kept a large vegetable garden and allowed weeds to make up the rest of their lawn — except for Creeping Charlie and Bindweed, against which I believe my mother finally won her three-decades-long jihad in 1999. The trick to getting away with a weedy yard, apparently, is to immediately mow whenever the “grass” gets higher than three inches.

I work full-time, have two sons who are still too young to conscript into my yard-army, hate mowing, and have a badly landscaped yard filled with curves, bushes, trees, inclines and abandoned raised garden beds. Mowing my postage stamp yard is akin to the tactical planning behind a military sortie. Every landscaper I contact takes one look, and never returns my calls again. I can only assume they have gone mad at the sight and gouged out their eyes with a sharpened spoon.

I hate my yard and I hate mowing it.

Up until 2002, I’ve lived in apartments, so I didn’t really care about things like urban-sprawl, invasive plants, non-native species, or the disappearing prairie biome. My only exposure to tall-grass prairies had been the occasional disastrous camping trip with my wife to places like Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota and Blue Mounds State Park in Minnesota, to see the Great American Bison. We did learn about the prairie — thanks to the prairie ecosystem the Native Americans stewarded for centuries, the United States has some of the richest farmland on Earth.

Intense cultivation and the spread of the American suburban lifestyle have relegated the prairie to isolated oases in National and State Parks, prairie restoration areas and railroad rights-of-way. Mono-cultured, fertilized and irrigated lawns common to suburban developments are essentially wastelands bereft of diversity and vitality that offer native fauna little sustenance and shelter. To attract birds to their homes, suburbanites typically put out birdseed. And a butterfly is a rare sight. Dragonflies are almost non-existent in many suburbs. We are left to contend with pests like mosquitoes and yellow-jackets, and weeds like Creeping Charlie and Quackgrass.

When we bought our house, I mowed the lawn a couple of times, and had enough of it. I started reading Noah’s Garden by Sara B. Stein. Ms. Stein strikes me as an idealist, but I like the basic tenet of her book:

Cultivating a green lawn is harmful to the environment; instead you can have an aesthetically pleasing yard by letting things go native and a bit wild. If you can recruit your adjacent neighbors to do the same, you can transform your suburban landscape into an eco-friendly haven.

Sounds good. Sign me up.

Steps I’ve Taken So Far

In 2004, I removed several Japanese Barberries, some Variegated Dogwood and other non-native shrubs from my yard. The previous owners apparently fancied themselves great gardeners and landscapers, but they weren’t thinking when they planted all those specimens — many became sickly because they weren’t in the right spot for their light and water requirements. I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend my summer afternoons watering shrubbery that doesn’t belong here in the first place!

I also had a Pin Oak dying of chlorosis removed (What kind of person thinks it’s a good idea to plant a Pin Oak in iron deficient soil?!) And I chopped down a dead Cherry tree, two Spruces and a Norwegian Maple.

We also had a very attractive green aluminum fence installed for the backyard. By the way, if you’re planning on installing a fence, make sure at least one of the gates is wide enough to accommodate a Bobcat — this should be about six feet wide —and make it accessible to the street. Our gate is wide enough for people but not machinery, so any work we do in the back is restricted to manual labor. This can get tiresome and expensive. Our arborist couldn’t fit his stump remover through, so we’re now stuck with three tree stumps in the back yard.

2005, the “Woodland Garden” - I cleared about fifty square fee under my Honey Locust tree and started what I call my “Woodland Garden” (I think my neighbors call it a Weedland Garden …). It’s pretty well established now, three years on, with Wild Columbine, Bergamot, Rudbeckia, Coreopsis, Tall Joe Pye Weed, Blue Stemmed Goldenrod, Woodland Sunflower, and Echinacea (purpurea and pallida).

The Woodland Garden also has a lot of Virginia Wild Rye which, in retrospect, may have been a mistake — it looks just a little too weedy.

Birds, bees, butterflies and dragonflies like to hang out in the Woodland Garden. If you like Goldfinches, I suggest you plant some Woodland Sunflower and several species of Coneflower — they love the seeds and, in the long run, these plants are cheaper to maintain than keeping a bird feeder stocked with thistle seed.

I also started growing several small areas of Indiangrass, Switchgrass, Little Bluestem, Rattlesnake Master (which finally bloomed this year because my wife didn’t get a chance to “weed” it … she always mistakes it for a thistle), and Prairie Dropseed.

The grasses are doing well, but they’re out of the way and their footprint is too small to make a dent in the rest of the yard.

Why I Ended My Prosper Loan Listing

2008 - I get a landscape design and estimate Landscapers do NOT return my calls when I ask them to come out every so often (once a week maybe?) to mow my lawn. I think they case the lawn first, then decide it’s simply not worth the effort. I’ve gotten a citation from my township’s lawn police. Oh well.

So, I figure, why not just get a landscaper to raze the whole yard, and design something that minimizes my mowing requirements, has nice borders and concentrates on working with nature and using native plants.

I paid $150 for a guy to come out, take a look at the yard, take some measurements, listen to my requirements, and create a design and estimate. Two months later, I had to pester him to let me see what he came up with. Here’s a list of the non-native plants he wanted to use:

• Green Velvet Boxwood (Korea)
• Panicum virgatum Shenandoah (native, but this is a domesticated cultivar that looks more like the Asian Imperata than American Switchgrass)
• Sunburst Ruby Penstemon, a Mexican-American hybrid
• Beni Kaze Grass (Japan)
• Northern Pampas Grass (North Africa, Southern Europe, considered a growing invasive threat in California)
• Miss Kim Lilac (China and Korea)
• Shasta Daisy - a hybrid of Leucanthemum lacustre from Portugal, apparently, and Leucanthemum maximum from France and Spain
• Bowles Golden Sedge (Eastern Europe)

So, what part of “I want to use only native species” did this landscaper not understand?

I got a couple of good things out of my experience with this landscape “designer”. First I got a ballpark figure on a complete reformation of my yard - $30,000 US. Wow. I decided I might as well start requesting a loan from Prosper.

I also got some nice designer-type drawings of my lawn that I could photocopy, draw on, scratch out and erase, and draw on again.

Regarding my Prosper loan request - I realized that I didn’t quite have all my ducks in a row: I still had to beat the landscaper over the head for wanting to put a bunch of non-native species in my yard; I didn’t have a venue to promote my loan properly and get the best interest rate possible; and I didn’t have a way to fully describe the purpose for my loan request and completely answer lender questions (Prosper has an all-too-short character limit on these two things).

I canceled the loan request two days before the bidding ended, but I’ll probably submit another request soon.

About the “Suburban Ecology” logo

I created the contest, Logo for Suburban Ecology at 99designs.com. All the submissions were excellent, so it was a tough decision. In the end, I narrowed my choice down to two designs both psychedelic and reminiscent of the 60s. If you need a logo, I’d recommend any of the designers who submitted to the contest — they listened to my requirements and ran with them. They are very creative people.

Now, if only I could find a landscaper who would listen to my requirements, too ….